RDF questions

2003-10-17T14:18:37Z

Danny Ayers: Of course if Atom was expressed in an RDF-friendly syntax* then FOAF and every other RDF language could be used directly in Atom without having to jump through hoops.

Danny, a few questions. For the basis of my questions, presume a comparison against RSS 1.0, which unquestionably is an RDF friendly vocabulary.

I embedded FOAF inside of my feed. Wouldn't the syntax for embedding FOAF inside of dc:creator be pretty much the same? In other words, wouldn't it be the same amount of "hoops", or lack thereof?
To me, the killer app of metadata is query. If I were to switch from atom:name to foaf:name, people would have to update their XPath queries in order to access the data in its new place. How would RQL handle this? Wouldn't they also have to update their queries?

To me, this gets at the heart of the value proposition for RDF. What I hear is that it essentially provides extensibility for free. I'd just like to see this promise expressed in tangible terms.