Hacking Congress (with XML)
XML.com: Stuck in the Senate.
by Paul Ford, XML.com,
October 13, 2004.
In this second article in a series, Ford looks at how to use
RDF (Resource Description Framework) to describe people (in this case, Senators), their roles, and their offices using XML. Why, you ask?
…[T]here is, I think, an important distinction between the Semantic Web and the Web As We Know It (WAWKI). The Semantic Web is about defining data in a consistent, accurate way, so that it can be shared by machines and by humans. The WAWKI is about moving human-friendly representations of resources from one place to another, and the focus on semantic consistency (in the form of XML, XHTML, and related standards) came after the basic architecture was established. The goal of this column is not to build a “Semantic Web site” because such a thing doesn’t really exist. Rather, we’re aiming to build a useful knowledge base of information about a specific domain, to publish that knowledge base on the Web, so that agents, both human and machine, can use the data in ways that aids them in accomplishing their goals and plans.