- From: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>
- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:44:25 -0500
- To: Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
- Cc: Peter Krantz <peter@peterkrantz.se>, egov-ig mailing list <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
I know I might be missing some context here, but the statement that
HTML Microdata is an evolutionary dead end is very strong, and in fact
I strongly disagree with it. Compared with RDFa, Microdata represents
a vastly simplified processing model for consumers of metadata we find
in HTML on the Web. It also lacks a lot of the confusing baggage that
comes along with semantic web technologies. This simplicity comes at a
price of course in the form of lack of expressiveness, and a clear
path to using existing RDF driven vocabularies. I say this as a member
of the Semantic Web Deployment group (which no longer exists), which
had a hand in creating the RDFa standard, and as a publisher of
hundreds of thousands of RDFa documents at the Library of Congress
[1].
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone on this
discussion list is in a place to be able to officially say that the US
Government should be using RDFa v1.1 over Microdata. Currently all the
schema.org examples use Microdata, and I've seen statements from
data.gov about their interest in supporting the use of schema.org [1].
The thread above made it sound like schema.org partners (Google, Bing,
etc) have made a commitment to parse RDFa. I know there has been some
anecdotal evidence [2] that this is the case, but has anyone said
anything official yet?
I don't want to make this sound like I think RDFa has no value. I
think it does. But in the interests of one (happy) Web, a topic that
should be near and dear to the mission of the W3C, could we please
refrain from making official sounding statements about what can and
cannot be used on US Government websites?
Thanks,
//Ed
[1] http://www.data.gov/communities/node/116/blogs/41361
[2] http://manu.sporny.org/2012/google-indexing-schema-rdfa/
On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com> wrote:
> ref: a formal recommendation
>
> Hyperlinks have an engineering pedigree, and RDFa 1.1 Lite is expressed in
> this "language" ...
>
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
>
> (sorry I have no way to post this at the moment)
>
> In that context, a subset of Plain (Unicode) Text for eGov Work might be
> defined as by reference to RFC 2396. Note that several keyboard characters
> are missing, {}[]`~|\#$^, etc., and some have been added, copyright, etc..
> Keyboards are manufactured to suit very old USASCII sensibilities, not a big
> deal actually because any character without a key has a Unicode.
>
> unicode = "&" + "#x" + ([hex]{4,2}) + ";"
> = "&" + "#x" + ([hex]{4,2}) + ";"
>
> empty = | "∅"
> = | "∅"
>
> [hex] = [RFC 2396]
> [lowalpha] = [RFC 2396]
> [upalpha] = [RFC 2396]
> [digit] = [RFC 2396]
>
> collapse = | " " | "\n"
> = | " " | " "
>
> punctuation = | "'" | "." | "?" | "," | ";" | ":" | """ | "!"
> = | "'" | "." | "?" | "," | ";"
> | ":" | """ | "!"
>
> math = | "-" | "+" | "/" | "=" | "<" | ">"
> = | "-" | "+" | "/" | "=" | "<" |
> ">"
>
> group = | "(" | ")"
> = | "("| ")"
>
> egov = | "@" | "%" | "©" | "®" | "§" | "™" | "¶" | "¤"
> = | "@" | "%" | "©" | "®" | "§" |
> "™" | "¶" | "¤"
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Peter Krantz <peter@peterkrantz.se>
> To: egov-ig mailing list <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2012 11:35 AM
> Subject: Re: [DataGov-DEV] Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft
>
>
> Hi!
>
> Interesting! Is that statement publicly available somewhere? Is it a formal
> recommendation that will be put in a guideline document or similar?
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter
>
>
> 14 dec 2012 kl. 17:51 skrev Bernadette Hyland <bhyland@3roundstones.com>:
>
> To eGov'ers,
> The following is a relevant thread to our discussion today raised by Daniel
> Bennett re: human & machine readable data. The thread was a discussion
> started in September 2012 related to what might be contained in a best
> practice recommendation for US Government Agencies & Offices vis a vis mark
> up to improve access, readability & re-use of government Web pages.
>
> This executive summary is, stick with RDFa 1.1 Lite because it enjoys both
> support from the world's major search engines *and* the Web's standard
> organization, the W3C.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bernadette Hyland, co-chair
> W3C Government Linked Data Working Group
> Charter: http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: "Thomas, George (OS/ASA/OCIO/OEA)" <George.Thomas1@hhs.gov>
> Subject: Re: [DataGov-DEV] FW: Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft
> Date: September 26, 2012 5:35:58 PM EDT
> To: Bernadette Hyland <bhyland@3roundstones.com>, "Marion Royal (XI)"
> <marion.royal@GSA.GOV>
> Cc: "DATAGOV-DEV@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV" <DATAGOV-DEV@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV>
>
> Agree, and the RDFa 1.1 Lite Primer answers Marion's question about XHTML vs
> HTML5 – from that doc;
>
> "RDFa 1.1 is specified for both XHTML [XHTML-RDFA] and HTML5 [HTML-RDFA]."
>
> RDFa 1.1 Lite is a subset of RDFa 1.1.
>
> -g
>
> From: Bernadette Hyland <bhyland@3roundstones.com>
> Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 4:46 PM
> To: Marion Royal <marion.royal@gsa.gov>, George Thomas
> <george.thomas1@hhs.gov>
> Cc: data gov <DATAGOV-DEV@listserv.gsa.gov>
> Subject: Re: [DataGov-DEV] FW: Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft
>
> Hi George & Marion,
> You're not the only one with a headache, I'd like to think I got some ice
> cream in the deal ;-)
>
> The following guidance is provided as a practitioner of Linked Data for the
> USG and W3C Gov't Linked Data working group co-chair. It is as current as
> you're likely to find. My sources include the co-chair of W3C RDF WG &
> Schema.org. I hope this helps the Open Data working group.
>
> The goal of this discussion is to provide structured data within HTML pages.
> Agencies want to do this because they want people to gather structured data
> and re-use it. If Agencies publish this data in structured ways, tools can
> spider and use it; developers can use it and humans can access/re-use it
> easier. This is what open data people consider nirvana.
>
> The question is, should US Government produce pages with:
> a) microdata
> b) RDFa 1.1 Lite [1]
> c) RDFa 1.1 [2]
> d) none of the above
>
> The answer: b) - RDFa 1.1 Lite
>
> The US Government is best served by producing Web pages with RDFa 1.1 Lite
> because the large search engines, as members of Schema.org, have agreed to
> parse that information. Google and Yahoo! have been supporting RDFa 1.1
> Lite for some time. Other big search engines, e.g., Bing, Yandex have
> agreed to support it through Schema.org. Further, RDF 1.1 Lite, is fully
> upward compatible to RDFa 1.1. Thus, anyone with structured data that cannot
> be expressed in RDFa 1.1 Lite *can* express it in RDFa 1.1 and the search
> engines will get out of it what they can.
>
> The USG should not be recommending the use of microdata. Microdata is an
> evolutionary dead end. We don't want to limit what people might want to say
> in structured data in Web pages in the future.
>
> Again, to be perfectly clear, experts on Web standards should be giving
> clear guidance to US Government Agencies to use RDFa 1.1 Lite, not
> microdata. RDF 1.1 Lite is basically microdata except you can define
> different vocabularies. This is a good thing because organizations describe
> data in different ways.
>
> If you review only one primer on RDFa 1.1 with treatment of RDFa Lite,
> please see the W3C "RDFa 1.1 Primer", Ben Adida, Ivan Herman, Manu Sporny,
> Mark Birbeck, eds, published 07-June-2012.[3]
>
> Just for completeness on this thread, today (Sept 2012) we have two W3C
> Standards for expressing RDF, they are RDF/XML and RDFa. The RDF Working
> Group is currently working to standardize Turtle, N-triples, JSON/LD which
> is imminent.
>
> The W3C HTML5 specification is currently an "Editor's Draft" as of
> 25-Sept-2012. The Editors include people from Microsoft, W3C and Apple.
> The working group is charter through 31-Dec-2014 which implies that an HTML5
> Recommendation is expected sometime in 2014.
>
> Keep your feet on the path of RDFa 1.1 Lite and we'll all reach open data
> nirvana in this lifetime.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bernadette Hyland, co-chair
> W3C Government Linked Data Working Group
> Charter: http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/
>
> [1] RDFa Lite 1.1, W3C Recommendation, June 7, 2012, Manu Sporny, editor,
> see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/
>
> [2] RDFa Core 1.1, W3C Recommendation, June 7, 2012, Ben Adida, Mark
> Birbeck, Shane McCarron, Ivan Herman, editors, see
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/
>
> [3] RDFa 1.1 Primer, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2012 22:44:53 UTC