- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:57:58 +0100
- To: Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>
- Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, Tom Heath <tom.heath@talis.com>, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, bill.roberts@planet.nl, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web at W3C <semantic-web@w3c.org>
Hi Jeremy/Pat, On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Jeremy Carroll<jeremy@topquadrant.com> wrote: > Pat Hayes wrote: >> >> RDF should be text, in documents. One should be able to use it without >> knowing about anything more than the RDF spec and the XML spec. If it >> requires people to tinker with files with names starting with a dot, or >> write code, or deploy scripts, then the entire SWeb architecture is >> fundamentally broken. >> > > Largely agreeing with you Pat, I think I would want to go a step further and > say that you should be able to use RDF without knowing anything about the > RDF spec or the XML spec, or any other spec. Web users are not required to > read the specs. > > Using RDF includes publishing it. The "infrastructure" whatever that is > should achieve the ability to publish my data in an appropriate way. I guess what you're getting at here is the more general point about tools hiding RDF, but I'd like to add some comments on HTML more specifically. HTML publishing really took off when it became easy for anyone to publish. Originally that was word processors that converted their output to HTML, but you still had to deploy your document to a server. Then it was CMS systems that could be used as easily by small businesses and schools as large corporations, but you still needed to have a server. Then it became blogs, where someone else did the server install, and you just typed in the content. Then it was wikis -- ditto. Now it's Google Docs, Facebook pages, Tweets, and more. In other words, publishing HTML just gets easier and easier, and that's the infrastructure that's important -- the HTML publishing infrastructure. So to publish RDF, we should simply be leveraging that enormous infrastructure. This theme was one of the major motivations for the creation of RDFa (née RDF/XHTML), and I would say that it's an even more important theme today; so much so that I made it the core of a presentation I did at SemTech last week, on 'RDFa: The Semantic Web's Missing Link'. [1].) Regards, Mark [1] <http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/06/slides-for-semtech2009-talk-on-rdfa> -- Mark Birbeck, webBackplane mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR)
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 21:58:39 UTC