Re: Mapping Microformats to RDFa

Manu,

what you propose to do is great (and thanks for it!) but I would phrase
it differently...

In general, there is no such thing as an RDFa vocabulary:-). There are
various RDF vocabularies that can be mapped on RDFa. Whereas it is good
if for the various microformats there is an agreed RDF vocabulary that
duly represents the microformat, the exact encoding of that RDF
vocabulary in RDFa may be a matter of taste to the HTML author (which
actually shows the added flexibility of RDFa vs microformats!). Ie, we
may have "possible" mapping of that vocabulary to RDFa, but no more.

This distinction is all the more important because there _is_ some work
happening for the first step, ie, microformat->RDF, by the GRDDL group.
Indeed, once that step is well defined, then corresponding GRDDL
transforms can be defined and that could get microformatted data into
RDF in an agreed way. See:

http://esw.w3.org/topic/CustomRdfDialects
http://esw.w3.org/topic/MicroModels

What I think would be even better is to have a strong cooperation with
those guys. Ie,

- define the RDF equivalent to all major microformats together with the
GRDDL folks;
- let the GRDDL folks define/implement the corresponding GRDDL transforms
- we should show some ways on how that RDF dialect can be encoded in
RDFa. It is probably a good practice to make this encoding as close to
the original microformat to ease the transition, but we should emphasize
that this is only one of an infinite variety of ways how this can be done...

What do you think?

Thanks a lot for this initiative!

Ivan



Manu Sporny wrote:
> We've started an initiative to map all of the current Microformats to
> RDFa vocabularies.
> 
> The goal is to identify deficiencies in RDFa vocabularies and create a
> plan to fill those gaps in the next 6 months.
> 
> This builds upon the work that Danny Ayers did in 2005 with his
> MicroModels[1] approach to the semantic web. Please let me know if this
> is duplicating work done elsewhere:
> 
> http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/mapping-ufs-to-rdfa
> 
> -- manu
> 
> [1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/MicroModels
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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