Practical relevance (e.g., Re: GRDDL and OWL/XML)

It would be good to have an answer to:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/0102.html

"""In practice it isn't at all clear that GRDDL is in any way  
relevant in the
real world (much like almost anything related to RDF), and so it isn't
really an important concern for the development of the HTML language."""

Granting that this is a hostile audience ("much like almost anything  
related to RDF") I really would like to know an answer. OWL/XML seems  
to be about the best case one could hope for (since OWL/RDF *is*  
something we want), but it's really hard to say why GRDDL (in the  
sense of autoexecutable) is remotely relevant. It doesn't *enable*  
any functionality; it merely mandates a certain *style*.

Can we have some scenarios? Concrete ones? I've spent time trying to  
think of one, but I really have trouble. Even in the OWL case.

AUTHORING
I've heard in the OWL case, for example, that OWL/XML risks shutting  
out legacy tools that only consume RDF/XML. But first, they don't  
seem to be GRDDL sensitive anyway (e.g., Protege3.x). Second, there  
are plenty of ways to get RDF/XML from OWL/XML that are easily  
discoverable (e.g., <http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/converter/ 
restful.jsp>). It seems like users of legacy OWL tools have *plenty*  
of mechanisms to work with OWL/XML.

SPIDERING
Ok, let me try another: semantic web spiders (swoogle etc.). If  
there's GRDDL available they'll be able to scrape more and more easily.

But this *also* seems strange. If I'm a spider author, I'm going to  
make damn sure that my translations are robust (or I'm just writing a  
toy and it seems catering for toy tools is very strange). So what I  
want is the clearest possible specification of the translation. This  
will almost surely not be an XSLT (for example) except in the  
simplests of cases. (And qua spec, a pdf of the XSLT is fine.) I  
mean, however does Google *manage* being able to search Word docs and  
PDFs and so on without GRDDL like translations available for them to  
download?

BROWSING
Ok, here's a final scenario, suppose I have a generic RDF web  
browser, call it Fabulator. To be, in abstracto, maximally useful it  
needs to be able to get maximal amounts of RDF from sources (let's  
suppose). So, autoGRDDL helps, yes?

This seems almost plausible, though not for the OWL case (since  
that's well known and all the arguments in spidering apply), but  
again, if we look at the web, we see no autoloading, but always with  
user intervention, typically directed back to the *browser author*  
site, not to the namespace.

I do see a use for having a "GRDDL" tool, that is, something that can  
scrape various formats (but not just XML? see the first part of  
Hixie's email) to RDF *for the RDF person*. (And sometimes, I am that  
person!) And I'd like format authors, when it's reasonable, or at  
least, format communities, to provide a preferred way of doing the  
translation *so I can update my tool*. I don't want to *force* them  
to spec it "on spec" so to speak (e.g., how many people *pay* for RDF  
functionality, either in cash or in fame and fortune and  
connections?), but it seems like one could be judicious and friendly  
about it.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2008 10:37:06 UTC