Why triples? It has been stated that an RDF based on triples is too low level to be useful. I cannot say whether triples are useful to any particular person for any specific purpose. I would like to suggest some questions that people may find useful in deciding whether triples and by extension RDF may be useful for a particular project or purpose.

In this article I consider RDF as a simplified XML infoset.

If triples are too low level to be useful as a basic on which to develop a predicate logic language, other candidates would be a pure text based syntax or an XML based syntax. The benefit of XML is not that it is often the very 'best' syntax for people to read or write but particularly that it is generally the best compromise as a syntax that is both human and machine readable. That was perhaps the initial reason why XML became as popular as it is today. I have absolutely no doubt that any particular piece of information encoded in XML could be similarly encoded in s-expressions but that has become an entirely moot point. Indeed the layout and transformation language that generally preceded XSLT was DSSSL - a derivative of Scheme. So certainly the developers of XML were well aware of Lisp. What has happened is that the web community has decided on the XML syntax and people are generally interested in putting up with any particular shortcomings of XML in the interest of being able to take advantage of the available software for parsing, manipulating, storing and transmitting XML.

Let us further examine the implications of developing a logic or for that matter any other, language on XML itself or alternatively on the RDF XML syntax.

XML 1.0 may represent directed labelled graphs. Representing trees is straightfoward and well accepted. Representing links in XML 1.0 can be done by entities. Yet entities add complexity to the XML abstract syntax and most real world interfaces (e.g. SAX, DOM, XPath) do not provide sufficient detail concerning such XML 1.0 constructs as entities (which require DTDs) in order to make XML 1.0 a reasonable platform itself on which to represent DLGs.

Additional facilities have been built on XML 1.0 to enable integration with the Web, namely the XML namespaces recommendation, RDF and XLink. The namespaces recommendation has been controversial for several reasons but particularly because of the lack of direction given toward what a namespace name URI reference ought reference. RDDL has emerged as a reasonable solution to this issue, one which models a namespace as a proper set of resources.

However namespaces do not easily work with DTDs, so accepting XML namespaces leaves the problem of how to represent DLGs in a namespace aware fashion.

XLink and RDF are both W3C recommendations aimed at answering this question.

The XML 1.0 abstract syntax is described by a set of 57 EBNF productions which themselves can be represented in XML/RDF [XSet]. Common programming level interfaces such as SAX, DOM and XPath used a simplified verion of this abstract syntax which generally corresponds to the XML Infoset. Much debate occurs as to what level of detail the commonly accepted subset ought capture. There is general agreement that whether an XML attribute is delimited by a single or double quote character is not important. Nor is the order of attributes. The fact that an information item is an attribute vs. element and the order of child elements is significant.

The RDF 'Infoset' or abstract syntax can be considered a yet simplified XML infoset where the origin of an item/object as from either an attribute or child element is not important, nor is the order of child elements (Syntactic conventions do enable cpature of order in rdf:Seqs).

What is gained by this simplification? An RDF abstract syntax can generally be stored in a single table with three columns. As such, the possibility exists to use RDF client side applications on handheld clients (for example) whereas the need to deploy a full XML enabled database would provide greater overhead. This, along with a simplified application and query model are the sole benefits of the triple model over the XML Infoset (or full XML grove) in their entirety.