The past week has seen quite a bit of activity involving RDF. Sergey Melnik released a new version of his RDF library, Dan Connolly continued having fun with XSLT and RDF and there was movement on reconciling RDF with XML Schemas, XLink and SOAP.

Sergey Melnik announced the release of a new version of his RDF library. The distribution supports validation of UML/RDF and RDFS schemas and corresponding inferencing (generalization, inverse relationships).

Dan Connolly posted a message describing his efforts to map Shoe to RDF using XSLT. This touched off quite a bit of discussion with some members of the SHOE project team. See the rdf-interest archive for more information.

Eve Mahler posted a proposal for how to map XLink to RDF. Ron Daniel followed up with a straw appendix to the XLink specification that covered the same material. Paul Grosso then suggested that the XLink/RDF mapping should be presented as a W3C note rather than an XLink appendix.

Ralph Swick has been identifying potential issues with the XML Schema specification and how it supports the recommendations described in the Cambridge Communique for interoperability between XML Schemas and RDF schemas. His issues have included how to interpret the contents of the xsd:appinfo element and the need for well known URI for datatypes.

Dan Brickley forwarded a message that Andrew Layman had posted to xml-dev that posited that there is a direct mapping between the SOAP encoding rules and RDF. Dan is looking for a volunteer to put together the XSLT to map from SOAP to RDF. Henrik Frystyk Nielsen will be presenting on the topic of SOAP, RDF and the Semantic Web as part of the WWW9 Developer Day Semantic Track which may shed more light on the synergy between SOAP and RDF.

Finally, Stefano Mazzocchi posted another of his thought provoking random thoughts messages to the cocoon developers list. The topic of this note is the possible contribution that Cocoon could make to enable the "Semantic Web".

Cocoon (starting from its version 2.0) is based on the sitemap. The sitemap is the location of all the processing information required to generate a resource. This is metadata, this is "data about data". If we clean it up a little, RDF-ize it, then it would be very easy for Cocoon to expose its sitemap to semantic crawlers.