Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

In my continuing quest to understand all these Syndicatation/publishing APIs and the semantic web stuff, I went to the local borders the other day and got Practical RDF by Powers (O'Reilly).

First off, the book: Simply too long. Powers dwells on topics over and over that should be the easy ones to get your head around for anyone who has worked with a computer in the last 10 years. Ironically, however, she constantly referrs the reader to the W3C spec documents -- dry reading indeed and the reason I wanted a book to begin with -- for too many points requisite to understanding the RDFs implementations. Not something I would expect from a book with "Practical" in the name.

Finally, the book doesn't seem to do much with real-world RDF specifications, aside from one quick-hit chapter at the end. Frankly much of the overexplanation in the first 60% of the book could have been replaced with more practical examples and it would have been a much better book.

Now, as to the subject matter. RDF is a damned nightmare. I'm really at the point where I think these people making standards need to be shot. RDF is so loosely coupled with data as to be almost stilly. I'm sure at some point OWL might be relevant to a little bit of the web, but I'm not going to bet on it taking off. Even RSS 1.0, arguably the only "real" RDF application out there, breaks with the RDF concept as you can't mix and max datapoints from other systems with it. Even the "standard" ways of annotating metadata within pages are just stupid in their lack of definition in letting a client know what kind of metadata to expect. There are also 18 ways to do everything in RDF/XML (the XML serialization of RDF models, to be clear), but the working groups directive on backwards compatibility means that everything is going to get worse, not better, in the future.

Frankly, after seeing what a mess ATOM is with its "We're SOAP, but we don't have a clue what that means" spec, and reading this book, I am of the opinion that this whole tact is going to fail.