Keith Jenkins will lead a discussion of statement-based models for data and metadata. Such models break apart traditional "records" into a set of simple statements (often called "triples") that are comprised of a subject, a property, and an object, such as "X isA book" and "X hasAuthor Y".

• Why should we want to do this?
• How can it help us to integrate information from disparate sources?
• How can it help us to manage changes to our data and metadata?
• How can it help us to better understand the things described by our metadata?
• How can it help us to simplify our programming code?
• What are the practical limits of such an approach?

We shall attempt to address these questions and more, all the while trying to keep the discussion at a high level, above the specific details of implementation and syntax. Accordingly, we will not be showing any slides of RDF-XML examples.

This forum is Part One of a trilogy that will be presented throughout the upcoming year. Part Two will focus on ontologies. Part Three will discuss the "Semantic Web".