Comment on RDFa 1.1 Core: Profiles, term mappings, and URIs as literals

Hello RDFa WG members,

This is a comment on Profiles in the latest RDFa WD [1]. The draft  
provides a mechanism for establishing term mappings using RDF triples  
of the following general shape:

     ?x rdfa:term "name" .
     ?x rdfa:uri "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name" .

I ask that the mechanism be changed to the following form:

     <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> rdfa:term "name" .

This change should be made for the following reasons:

1. Conciseness. If one triple is enough to say it, there should be one  
triple.

2. Putting URIs into RDF literals is almost always an anti-pattern.

3. The principle of least surprise.

4. Using a URI simplifies the creation of self-contained profiles that  
contain a set of term mappings along with labels for the classes and  
properties, mappings to other vocabularies, presentation hints etc.

5. Using a URI simplifies the extension of existing RDF Schema  
documents (e.g., the RDF version of the FOAF spec) to RDFa profiles.

Best,
Richard

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-rdfa-core-20100803/

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2010 10:54:06 UTC