Contd: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009

Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>
> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> To reiterate: I have approached and been approached by a number of 
>> people in the RDF and RDFa communities, and I have repeatedly asked 
>> for people to list problems and use cases that are of relevance in 
>> the context of RDFa and RDF, with those problem descriptions not 
>> mentioning RDFa or other technical solutions. So far we have seen 
>> *very few* of these.
>>
>>   
> Ian,
>
> I am quite relieved by your response.
>
> Here is an attempt at a use-case:
>
> When writing HTML (by hand or indirectly via a program) I want to 
> isolate at describe what the content is about in terms of people, 
> places, and other real-world things. I want to isolate "Napoleon" from 
> a paragraph or heading, and state that the aforementioned entity is:  
> is of type "Person" and he is associated with another entity "France".
>
> The use-case above is like taking a highlighter and making notes while 
> reading about "Napoleon". This is what we all do when studying, but 
> when we were kids, we never actually shared that part of our endeavors 
> since it was typically the route to competitive advantage i.e., being 
> top student in the class.
>
> What I state above is antithetical to the essence of the World Wide 
> Web, as vital infrastructure harnessing collective intelligence.
>
> RDFa is about the ability to share what never used to be shared. It 
> provides a simple HTML friendly mechanism that enables Web Users or 
> Developers to describe things using the Entity-Attribute-Value 
> approach (or Subject, Predicate, Object) without the tedium associated 
> with RDF/XML (one of the other methods of making statements for the 
> underlying graph model that is RDF).
>
>
>
To be a little clearer re. use-case:

Use of HTML to make annotations that aid the production and 
dissemination knowledge on a global basis.

I shouldn't have to switch to another language in order to express or 
identify concepts associated with the text/blurb in a Web page I am 
reading, writing, or publishing.


-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com