- From: Bradley Allen <bradley.p.allen@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:48:35 -0700
- To: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Cc: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>, 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>
Mark- Beautifully put. +1 on a hopefully accelerating trend towards simplicity and ease of adoption. - BPA Bradley P. Allen http://bradleypallen.org +1 310 951 4300 On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Mark Birbeck<mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com> wrote: > Hi Kingsley, > >> If you are comfortable producing (X)HTML documents, then simply use RDFa and >> terms from relevant vocabularies to describe yourself, your needs, your >> offerings, and other things, clearly. Once you've done that, simply leave >> the Web to do the REST :-) >> >> Everything else is a technical detail (imho). > > But that isn't the discussion we're having, IMHO. > > We're not talking about how you or I might do it -- people comfortable > with .htaccess files, server configuration, and so on. > > My understanding of the discussion that was going on, is that whilst > we all want to see the semantic web succeed (even if we all have a > different view of what the semantic web is), we're asking how exactly > it is that we can achieve it. > > And for years, the solutions proposed have been somewhat mysterious; > RDF/XML, SPARQL end-points, N3, content negotiation, 303s, and so on. > > You have to ask yourself at some point, do we want the data, or don't > we -- do we want people to publish stuff that we 'semwebbers' can use? > And if we do want it, then let's help them publish it. > > I may be biased because I've had my nose pressed up against it for too > many years, but I believe that in this regards, RDFa is a > game-changer. > > It's not GRDDL, which says 'publish whatever the hell you like and > we'll convert it'. It's not microformats, which says, 'here are a > handful of centralised vocabularies, for use on a decentralised web'. > And it's not RDF/XML, which requires you to take apart your server and > put it back together again. > > It's HTML. > > And everyone knows at least one way to publish HTML, don't they? > > In the years that I've been involved with the RDFa work, the mental > model I have always had, is of someone using Blogger or Drupal or > something just as simple, to publish RDF. That's now possible with > RDFa, and what's even more exciting, Yahoo! and Google will pick it > up. > > I realise I'm sounding like an evangelist (no doubt because I am one). :) > > But my suggestion would be that we have a window of opportunity here, > to create a semantic infrastructure that is indistinguishable from the > web itself; the more metadata we can get into HTML-space, the more > likely we are to bring about a more 'semantic' web...before anyone > notices. ;) > > Regards, > > Mark > > -- > 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 22:49:17 UTC