sound & midi applications page, was Re: [Consortium] linuxaudio.org

[Steve Harris]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 05:14:12 -0500, Dave Phillips wrote:
>  IIRC, we also discerned that one of the first tasks would be the 
> establishment of a backend database from the existing links
> and categories (which I would like to see redefined too). The URLs would 
> need culled and organized: I don't think this would
> be a terribly difficult first step, maybe a good Perl script can do it ? 
> Is PW not a Perlmeister ??  ;)

RDF! (rdf, rdf, rdf, ...) http://www.w3.org/RDF/

Full disclosure: You may want to take this with a pinch of salt due to
favourite hammer syndrome; I currently justify my existence by developing
a large-scale (GPL'd of course) RDF server.

Good points:

* this is exactly the kind of thing RDF is designed for
* nice query syntax (like SQL but better)
* very fashionable
* interoperability (metadata can be used, and partly understood, by other
  tools because RDF has inherent semantics)

Bad points:

* RDF/XML syntax is horrific (but you hardly ever deal with it)
* not famialiar to people who know LAMP systems
* a bit more resource intensive than PHP+MySQL
* RDF tools not as mature as relational databases

You wouldn't want to use RDF for things like user comments and reviews,
but its ideal for metadata-y things.

I could help by providing things like web form -> RDF/XML CGI scripts and
RDF knowledge-base hosting for betas. 

- Steve