It's that Kurt Cagle again

Hello all,

As always Kurt Cagle makes interesting points, this time in a round-up
of what to watch out for in XML technologies:

  Similarly, I suspect that while RDFa may have a fairly major hill to
climb in terms of
  adoption, it will likely end up becoming integral to the semantic
web fairly soon. _Folk
  ontologies_ (or folksonomies, as some have referred to them) are not
in fact really
  ontologies at all - they are instead simply property associations.
If you can articulate
  a consisten (sic) property relationship using attributes outside of
the normal XHTML
  ones, then you can do more than simply tag a document - you can in fact create
  relationships between entities in an XHTML document without having
to leave the
  context of that document. That's what RDFa does. These can then be
interpreted by
  RDF enabled tools, making it possible to achieve something of the
holy grail of the
  semantic web - provide a simple way of nonetheless encoding metadata into a
  document. I've argued for years that RDF as it exists right now is
too complex for
  your average web developer, and what's more it perforce requires
duplication of
  content between the RDF and XHTML (or whatever document format you're using).
  Eliminate this need for duplication by embedded the descriptive relational
  characteristics directly in the element's attribute set, and all of
a sudden the
  Semantic Web begins to move away from being unachievable to being doable.

The full article is here:

  <http://www.understandingxml.com/2007/03/where_is_xml_going.html>

Regards,

Mark

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@x-port.net | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Tuesday, 20 March 2007 23:08:42 UTC