Mapping hAudio Microformat to RDFa

Greetings all,

I've been in contact with Ben Adida for a couple of weeks now and he had
asked me to make a post explaining one of our RDFa projects. For the
past six months, we have been working with the Microformats (uF)
community to generate a semantic vocabulary for audio, video and images
on the web.

It took approximately 3 months to create an audio Microformat (hAudio)
and move it through the gauntlet that is the Microformats process. This
left us with a great appreciation for the logical, scientific process
that the uF community employs. However, when it came time to implement
the vocabulary, we saw issues regarding the Microformats implementation
approach.

The key issues we found are:

 1. A lack of namespacing making property name clashing a real danger.
 2. The requirement that uF parsers should be scope-less.

I would be more than happy to give details of these two issues at a
later time.

That being said, we would still like to help create a set of semantic
vocabularies for media (audio, video, and images) using the Microformats
process. However, for implementation, we would like to propose the use
of RDFa.

There are a number of people and organizations that we are working with
to make this happen. Mike Kaply of Operator fame, the Microformats
community, the Firefox people, the Songbird guys, the Miro/Democracy
Media player folks, CD Baby - one of the largest digital distribution
music providers in the world and a smattering of open source software
advocates are among the people with which we are associated. Our goal is
to make these vocabularies a widely adopted standard by using an open,
swift and accurate standards creation process.

I have made an attempt, with a great deal of help from Ben, to map the
hAudio Microformat to RDFa. He had made it clear that the RDFa
attributes are still in a state of flux. We did our best to illustrate
the hAudio draft standard given a changing set of attributes.. The draft
hAudio RDFa draft specification can be found here:

http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/HAudio_RDFa

Our goals in working with the RDFa community are below, feedback on
whether or not these are achievable would be great:

1. Give this list a solid "emerging standard" use case using hAudio.
2. Help this list map Microformats to RDFa.
3. Get some sort of W3C support or acceptance behind hAudio
   RDFa. Perhaps getting it on a "semantic vocabulary for media"
   standards track?
4. Gather public support for hAudio RDFa via Firefox 3, Songbird,
   Miro, record labels, Creative Commons and a variety of other
   organizations that need to mark up information about audio.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
DB Blog: Bitmunk Blazes Path in Film and TV
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2007/07/04/bitmunk-launches-video/

Received on Monday, 23 July 2007 23:34:50 UTC