Friday, May 23, 2003

A brief mention of Hyper-concordance from Tim Bray's The RDF Conversation generated some new visitors: thanks Tim, you're on my blogroll. And i'm still wondering whether there are applications of RDF (or things like OWL, built on top of it) that are worthy of your challenge (but you're right, hyper-concordance isn't about RDF, at least not yet).

Here's one thought: Nave's Topical Bible (background) has been a popular reference work for over 100 years because it provides encyclopedic access to concepts, not just words, in Scripture. Crosswalk has it on-line: check out the entry for Parents. There are several different attributes of this topic: partiality of parents, examples of parental affection, parental prayers on behalf of children, and a catch-all, "unclassified Scriptures pertaining to".

Naves defines an information space for Scripture that can be expressed in RDF terms. Topics are what's being described. The different attributes like "examples of parental affection" are RDF properties, whose RDF values are references to Scripture verses.  

The really hard part here is what's holding up the Semantic Web too: constructing these relationships takes a lot of work (Nave spent 14 years on his). Taking an existing resource like Nave's and converting it to RDF may be doable (i'm thinking about it): but creating such a resource in the first place is a large undertaking, whether the syntax is heavy-weight or no.


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