[jdom-interest] RE: RDF to JDOM?

[David Patterson]

I've been doing some work with Jena and it can read and write XML, but I'm
not aware of any methods to read into Jena directly from a DOM object. I
think it has nothing to do with JDom. You could go Jena -> XML -> JDOM or
the reverse, and use something like a StringWriter or StringReader to
process them in storage. From my experience, the sequence of XML going into
Jena does not match the sequence going out. Jena is very forgiving in being
able to read Individuals and Classes in pretty much any order. 

Also, I spent a lot of time trying to process and interpret OWL data as XML
content with JDOM. It is complex data and the Jena team has pretty good code
to build something similar to a DOM object. It is not a real DOM since DOM
is a tree structure and OWL data is a Graph. So, instead of Elements and
Attibutes, you have OntClasses, Individuals, Restrictions, Properties, etc.
It is very common to have multiple superclasses of a Class. Trying to build
your own internal Graph even from a JDom tree of the XML will be difficult. 

In the Jena discussion group, they often state that although OWL can be
coded as XML, that is but one of several ways the data can be expressed.
(From my experience, it may not be the best way to describe the data. I've
got enough XML background that writing XML by hand is not an issue for me.
Check out the "Turtles" format -- it is a shorthand for triple that allows
you to elide parts of triples when they match the previous triple.)

Also, with Jena, there are "reasoners" that can be used to create transitive
relations as if they were coded originally. 

Jena can do a lot of good things that are extremely difficult to do in JDom.
(And I am not trying to dump on JDom, it just seemed to me to be the wrong
tool for my data for this application.)

Dave Patterson 

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