Smart style: combining RDF semantics with XML document transformations

The “Document Web'' has established itself through the creation of an impressive family of XML and related languages. In addition to this, the “Semantic Web'' is developing its own family of languages based primarily on RDF. Although these families were both developed specifically for “the Web'', each language family has been developed from different premises with specific goals in mind. The result is that combining both families in a single application is surprisingly difficult. This is unfortunate, since the combination of semantic processing with document processing provides advantages in both directions --namely using semantic inferencing for more intelligent document processing and using document processing tools for presenting semantic representations to an end-user. In this paper, we investigate this integration problem, focusing on the role of (RDF) semantics in selecting, structuring and styling (XML) content. We analyze the approaches taken by two example architectures and use our analysis to derive a more integrated alternative. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia