intertwingly

It’s just data

Quantifying the "RDF tax"


There have been assertions of an "RDF Tax".  Not having an opinion on the subject, I decided to do a little investigating.  In particular, I sought to identify the highest potential "ceiling" to the RDF tax.

So, with the help of a number of people on IRC (in particular, Mark Pilgrim, Ken MacLeod, Shelley Powers, and Sean Palmer), I developed an XSLT transform from the Atom 0.2 snapshot into the most comprehensive RDF equivalent.  Some argued for me to simplify in the process... but the methodology I wanted to apply here was first to seek to understand, and only then to simplify.

The initial results are that the maximal Atom 0.2 snapshot balloons from 47 non-blank, non-comment lines to a whopping 61 lines.  And that is before simplification.  Clearly, some readibility was lost in the process.  This, too, needs to be addressed.

A number of observations:

Once we have a sufficient understanding of the "proper" way to apply RDF, then we can move on to exploring the " practical" way to apply RDF.