GRDDL + microformats economics-of-deployment use case

I have been thinking about the various roles involved
in deploying GRDDL dialects, e.g. microformats, especially
when discussing the costs and benefits of RDFa and GRDDL,
and I came up with a story that maybe we should add to
our use cases document:

1. Bob invents a new microformat, say, hFAQ for FAQs.

2. Bob chooses a profile URI
   (maybe he doesn't; that's a risk; but the microformats.org
   web site says each microformat should have one.)

3. Alice uses the hFAQ creator to start a new FAQ;
   the profile URI is included by default.

   (maybe she copies and pastes some hFAQ markup
   without copying the profile URI; that's a risk, but
   it also applies to RDFa namespace declarations.)

   (maybe Alice doesn't make well-formed XHTML; that's
    a risk; but it applies equally to RDFa, and the
    same class of solutions apply: tidy, etc.)

4. Jane, who wants FAQ info in RDF, writes some XSLT
   to convert hFAQ to RDF, either by using existing
   RDF vocabularies or using terms from the hFAQ
   profile, or by making up new RDF vocabularies.

5. Jane convinces Bob to add a profileTransformation
   to his hFAQ profile. Jane then gets RDF data
   for free (using GRDDL) from Alice's FAQ.

Note that Alice didn't need to learn RDF and
the tricky bits around monotonicity and defaults
etc.; she just needed to learn hFAQ.

Perhaps Susan is interested to learn enough of RDF
to do RDFa for her FAQ, then Jane can not only get RDF data,
but she can also get RDFa's copy/paste benefits (though
the risk in step 3 applies).

I think there are enough Alices in the world to deploy
new dialects with GRDDL; I wonder if there are enough Susans
to deploy them with RDFa.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2006 16:48:19 UTC