Re: Community outreach with a cheat sheet!

David Peterson wrote:
> 1. Would the W3C namespace be the best place to house these format
> vocabularies? (my answer: I definitely think so, it would lend a lot of
> weight to the vocabs. People are drawn to the stability of the W3C)

So this is where RDFa and Microformats differ - centralization of
vocabularies isn't required for RDFa to work correctly. However, we
don't want 10 different vocabularies that all do the same thing.

I've been trying to push the Microformats community to start developing
RDFa vocabularies along with the uF vocabularies that are already being
produced. Supporting RDFa vocabularies is a natural extension of what
we're doing right now in that community. Case in point: hAudio RDFa[1]
was a by-product of hAudio uF[2]... all of the research that went into
designing hAudio uF applies to hAudio RDFa - the only difference is the
words that we use for each property and the encapsulating namespaces.

However, I don't think that this is what you meant by this question -
were you attemping to address the question of "How are new RDF
vocabularies created?" or "Where should we put the cheatsheets?"

If it is the second question - they should go on the RDFa wiki.

> Just came across this cheat sheet for microformats [1] created by
> Brian Suda [2]. I know that Manu has spoken of translating some of
> the common microformats into RDFa.

Just a bit of background on this, as I don't know if this list is aware
of what's happening on that front. Mike Kaply, Ben and I have been
talking about a unified semantic web approach to data harvesting in web
browsers.

Basically, your web browser would harvest semantic data in eRDF, RDFa,
or Microformats and post-process it into a unified data format (RDF
Triples). This is important because when people write extensions to
handle this semantic data, they really just want to write against one
underlying format, not against RDFa AND Microformats AND eRDF. The
latter, writing for two semantic data formats, is what you have to do in
Operator right now and it's not ideal.

This is an experimental approach, and probably shouldn't go in Operator
until we are sure that it is do-able and works properly. That's
partially the reason that Fuzzbot[3] exists - to test if this unified
semantic web approach to data harvesting actually works. Here's the
rough pipeline to illustrate:

          +-> RDFa Parser --------------------+
Web Page -|                                   |--> triples ---+
          +-> uF Parser --> map to RDF vocab -+               |
                                                              |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 |
 +--> Action script (FOAF/hAudio/hCard/etc.) -> Web browser action

Triples were picked as the underlying representation format because you
can cleanly map Microformats to triples.

The reason we're looking at this pipeline is because we want people to
write simple semantic web action scripts for web browsers that operate
on triples, independent of the underlying data encoding format.

> 2. I am *very* keen to start this process and would Manu (and anyone else)
> be interested?

Yes - I am certainly interested. :)

Unfortunately, my time is stretched so thin right now that I can't do
much other than a phone call or two - if that would help. Send me an
e-mail if that would be sufficient.

> The creation of a cheat sheet(s) would be a vital piece for people to just
> grab/print (for the environments sake I hope not)/use. The sheets could even
> be themed: People, Events, etc.

I think this is a great idea! A good example of doing this right the
right way are the ilovejackdaniel's cheatsheets[4]:

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/regular_expressions_cheat_sheet.png
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/html-cheat-sheet.png
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/css_cheat_sheet.png

-- manu

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/haudio
[2] http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/HAudio_RDFa
[3] http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/
[4] http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: RDFa Basics in 8 minutes (video)
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/01/07/rdfa-basics/

Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 16:34:02 UTC