Re: telecon Thursday 14 May, 1500 UTC

Hi Ben,

> Our telecon is in a few hours, Thursday, 1500 UTC. Thanks to a fun episode
> of food poisoning, I am around and not traveling yet, so let's do this
> thing.

It's a shame that this week of all weeks, I have to give regrets. I
have another meeting about RDFa today, and this is the only time that
the other party can make.

I have some comments on a few of the agenda items, though, which I've
put inline, below.


> Agenda
>
> 1) Action Items
> http://www.w3.org/2009/04/30-rdfa-minutes.html#ActionSummary

My items are ongoing...although I'll have some progress on a couple
before the next telecon.


> 2) Future of RDFa - XG?
> activities: tools, evangelism, community assistance, vocab assistance (tools
> for vocabs in RDFa themselves?)

I like the sound of the XG.

On tools, I'd like to have given a report back from the Drupal 7 code
sprint at DERI, where they were putting RDFa support right into the
core. I went over to Galway for 36 hours, to offer RDFa advice, and it
was very exciting. Those guys really 'get it', and are working on both
RDF and RDFa features for Drupal.

An example on the RDFa side is that if someone leaves a comment on an
article, the page will automatically contain RDFa with values from the
SIOC vocabulary, indicating the item being replied to, who made the
reply, and so on. Since SIOC can also handle replies to replies, it
was quite neat to see pages being generated with arbitrary levels of
nesting, all easily handled by the way @rel creates bnodes.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this is a very big deal for
RDFa. Drupal has an enormous following, and by putting some RDFa
features into core, it sends a clear message to developers building
modules, about the future direction of Drupal.

Some notes are here:

  <http://drupal.org/node/443824>
  <http://drupal.org/node/378144>


On evangelism, I spoke on "RDFa: Now everyone can have an API" at
Yahoo!'s Open Hack Day in London on Saturday.

On the issue of vocabularies, I'd like to draw people's attention to
the Argot Hub, which was set up as a home for the vocabularies for the
UK government work I've been doing. The site contains a collection of
'bundles' of terms, rather than new vocabulary terms.

These bundles I've called argots, and the idea is more to guide people
towards widely used terminology (such as FOAF, vCard, etc.) that can
be used in combination, rather than inventing something new.

The site is a bit rough around the edges at the moment, mainly
oriented around wiki pages, but in a more recent project I'm using OWL
via RDFa to describe the argots, as a way to start to get some tools
working. I'll soon be going back to the previous argots in order to
rework them in the same way.

Since I have permission from the Central Office of Information to make
the vocabularies I'm working on for them public in this way, I think
it's a great opportunity to try to gradually grow the set of available
terms.

If anyone has a vocabulary that they'd like to give a home to, then I
hope they would consider Argot Hub. (I have a PURL URL, to make things
look neat.) And if anyone wants to lend a hand in any way, as with all
open projects, that would be greatly appreciated.

The site is here:

  <http://argot-hub.googlecode.com/>

and the associated Google Group is linked to it.


> 3) RDFa in HTML

Nothing to add here, other than 'go Shane'.


> 4) Mark's @token proposal vs. @prefix
> (brief discussion)
> http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/04/30/tokenising-the-semantic-web

The reason I think this is starting to get pressing, is actually
because of the Google announcement.

Obviously we all agree it's a great step for RDFa, but we shouldn't
forget that the Google samples all include *both* RDFa and
Microformats. And I'm already seeing people ask on Twitter for
guidance on which to use.

If Google is indexing both, then obviously people will use whichever
is easiest to add. Anyone using a CMS like Drupal will hopefully be
covered, since they'll increasingly get their RDFa for free as these
systems add RDFa support.

But for anyone doing it manually, the namespace issue is still a bit
of a deal. I think the @token idea has the potential to make RDFa
markup look much simpler.


Anyway, have a good meeting, and congratulations to all on an excellent week!

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, 14 May 2009 09:42:17 UTC