Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

Just RDFa and live happy IMO. A machine doesnt care about the "messy"
part of the markup. The advantage of a single URL to access it too
much to be a match for anything.

It is a fact that people like us like to look at RDF directly as well.
But it should be a problem to use a firefox plugin to extract the RDF


Giovanni


On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:09 PM, <bill.roberts@planet.nl> wrote:
> I've been trying to weigh up the pros and cons of these two approaches to
> understand more clearly when you might want to use each.  I hope that the
> list members will be able to provide me with the benefit of their experience
> and insight!
>
> So the situation is that I have some information on a topic and I want to
> make it available both in machine readable form and in human readable form,
> for example a company wanting to publish information on its products, or a
> government department wanting to publish some statistics.
>
> I can either:
> 1) include 'human' and 'machine' representations in the same web page using
> RDFa
> 2) have an HTML representation and a separate RDF/XML representation (or N3
> or whatever) and decide which to provide via HTTP content negotiation.
>
> So which should I use? I suppose it depends on how the information will be
> produced, maintained and consumed.  Some generic requirements/wishes:
>
> - I only want to have one place where the data is managed.
> - I want people to be able to browse around a nicely formatted
> representation of the information, ie a regular web page, probably
> incorporating all sorts of other stuff as well as the data itself.
> - I don't want to type lots of XHTML or XML.
> - I want the data to be found and used by search engines and aggregators.
>
>
> The approach presented by Halb, Raimond and Hausenblas (
> http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2008/papers/06-halb-raimond-building-linked-data.pdf)
> seems attractive: to summarise crudely, auto-generate some RDFa from your
> database, but provide an RDF/XML dump too.
>
> On the other hand I find that RDFa leads to rather messy markup - I prefer
> the 'cleanliness' of the separate representations.
>
> For any non-trivial amount of data, then we will need a templating engine of
> some sort for either approach.  I suppose what may tip the balance is that
> Yahoo and Google are starting to make use of RDFa, but AFAIK they are not
> (yet) doing anything with "classic" content-negotiated linked data.
>
> Anyone care to argue for one approach or the other?  I suppose the answer
> may well be "it depends" :-)  But if so, what does it depend on?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Bill Roberts

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 12:43:46 UTC