This presentation was about the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The talk wasn't directly related to tooling in Eclipse, but instead about what RDF is and how it is different from EMF.
The world is a complicated place, and EMF helps to make sense of it by providing great tools for interacting with data including generating code and creating rich UIs from a minimal description. A weakness of EMF is when the domain is more complicated or not fully known.
RDF is an alternative to modeling. It is best to think of RDF as a semantic graph containing:
- Subjects (resource)
- Objects (resource, value, or another subject)
- Predicates (an association between a subject and an object)
A graph in RDF is always right or wrong, and its meaning (or model) is deduced based on what information is available.
RDF graphs can be merged, and sub-properties are used to describe equivalent properties so that a merged graph doesn't contain irrelevant duplicate information. The result is that the migration between different versions of a graph or between different schemas containing the same types of information can be seamless.
To help tools with the visualisation of different data, RDF has vocabularies that are used as a baseline to specify the intent of the data, such as display labels. Clients of the data have to be flexible and accept that the information needs to be interpreted before it becomes useful.
The approach that RDF takes is interesting in that it seems to accept that the world is complicated, and that there is no ideal strict representation. However, a flexible representation facilitates the modeling of anything, and flexible viewers can be used to provide meaning.
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