A roundup of recent developments in the RDF world, including XSLT transformations for RDF generation, a schema-based approach for triple-generation, and simplified syntax discussions.

New initiatives are flourishing along the paths recently drawn by Leigh Dodds in his XML-Deviant column for finding ways to extract semantic information from XML sources.

XSLT: Running further on the XSLT highway, Dan Connolly announced an XSLT transformation "to scrape RSS/RDF" out of the W3C home page, allowing the publishing of a RDF/RSS 1.0 channel containing the W3C headlines.

Syntax: Following the syntax track and taking over on the long running "strawman" thread, Jonathan Borden announced a new simplified syntax--inspired by a previous proposal by Sergey Melnik--and also an XSLT transformation converting this syntax directly into RDF triples.

XLink: On the XLink road, Ron Daniel has asked for a last call of comments about his XLink to RDF mapping, and Jonathan Borden mentioned a first partial XSLT implementation.

Schemas: While these approaches are either intrusive (by imposing some constraints on the XML vocabularies as is the case with a simplified or a XLink syntax) or based on the development of specific transformations for each application, James Tauber has proposed a schema-based approach where the mapping between XML and RDF would be defined in separate schema files:

I believe that all descriptions of serialization of RDF should be separated out of the RDF Syntax specification and could be described merely in terms of the mapping language. I would imagine that powerful mapping language could be achieved simply by mapping XPaths to subject, predicate and object (and perhaps a handful of properties such as type and label.

Tauber is calling for comments and volunteers to work on his proposal, along with his Redfoot RDF server project:

My second question is: would anyone be interested in working on this (along with an implementation) as part of the Redfoot project?