RDFa advocacy ideas

This is an e-mail that was discussed a bit off-line. It's from Doug
Schepers, an all-around great guy that I had the pleasure of meeting at
this years Web Directions North conference in Denver, CO and the main
guy behind SVG and the WebAPI groups @ W3C. We brainstormed a bit about
RDFa advocacy and what we might be able to accomplish on a very limited
budget and a nascent community. Here's his first e-mail to kick-start
the conversation... please share your thoughts as you have them.

Doug Schepers wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, Folks-

Please allow me to cross-pollinate...

Dramatis Personae:
* Liz Turner, graphic artiste with a flair for the systematic
* Libby Miller, SemWeb goddess
* Dan Brickley, Semantic Plumber and Carpenter
* Manu Sporny, RDFa/Microformats evangelist
* your humble narrator, an SVG monomaniac and tender of fragile
technologies at W3C

Okay, most of you already know all this, but to put us on the same page...

I've been talking with Liz Turner, who made an awesome RDF shirt a few
years ago, with the same design as this postcard:
  http://liz.xtdnet.nl/swad/

This design was commissioned by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller as part of
SWAD:
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/final_report/

I was lucky enough to get one of these shirts, but now there are no more
left.  I think that these cool t-shirts are a great way to promote
SemWeb stuff, and I'd like to see another print run.

I suggested to Liz that we look into making a version with RDFa
replacing RDF.  Liz has already chimed in with a lot of information
about how we would need to do this, what tshirt shops we could go
through, etc. that will prove very valuable, if we decide to go ahead.
Libby and Dan are also interested in this.

Meanwhile, I've been talking a bit with Manu Sporny about ways to use
RDFa in SVG.  He and I are on the same page about making sure that RDFa
is simple to use, simple to understand, and solves real problems, or it
will never win adoption.  He's been doing outreach along those lines:
  http://rdfa.info/wiki/Introduction

I'm peripherally into SemWeb stuff as a hobby, so I am not on any
timeline here.  But if you all are interested in making a new tshirt
line to promote RDFa/SemWeb, then we could have a fun time.  We'd need
to gauge interest in how many shirts we'd want, how we are going to
spread them, etc.

In general, I'm interested in helping to promote SemWeb, and this is
just one of the things we could do.  I took Liz's original graphics and
rebuilt that same diagram, cleaning up the code and adding some
interactivity (Opera and Safari only for some of the features... mouse
and click around):
  http://www.schepers.cc/semweb/rdf-diagram.svg

For projects along this line, I was thinking of 2 different ideas:

1) hosting the mini-app above at some stable URL related to SemWeb
promotion, with that URL included on the tshirt; that could help promote
the topic by leading people to the site, where they could play with the
gizmo and then click through to learn more about RDF/a and other semweb
tech;

2) more ambitiously, a little Webapp that would use similar graphics to
let people compose RDF/RDFa markup by dragging and dropping icons,
attaching values to them, and connecting them together... and at the
end, it would output the RDF/a code (text) so they could use it on their
site.  It would be a bit like a graphical, snazzier FOAF-a-matic, with
scope beyond FOAF:
  http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html

If you are interested in following up with the tshirt or SemWeb
promotion in general, or know of anyone who I should have copied on
this, dive in.

Best Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Saturday, 14 March 2009 02:58:13 UTC