RE: FW: Now it's RDF and Microformats

Danny Ayers wrote on Monday, February 26, 2007 1:06 PM:

>> People who are more involved with microformats may prove me wrong, but 
>> currently I do not know of another universal and efficient way to 
>> store data collected from different microformats.

> I've not heard anyone say it yet, but presumably it would be fairly
straightforward to store aggregated microformat data in a HTML doc, query it
with jQuery or XPath.

> I could imagine it being as universal as the microformats get, efficiency
is another matter. (But for smaller datasets the RDF toolchain probably
wouldn't be any faster).

True, I did not mention storing as HTML docs because that seems quite
inefficient. It is OK for storing, and it is universal. But when querying
you would be searching for particular syntactic constructions (microformat
markup) rather than for the information itself.

A microformat is one of the ways to express particular information. But what
people are interested in is not microformats as such - they are interested
to find information about actual objects - Events, Books, People, ... 

Storing this information in HTML wraps it in syntactic "sugar" that will not
make finding data more efficient. Integrating data from a number of files
would cost even more. And the information about these objects can come from
a number of different sources, not only microformats. It can all be
converted to HTML, but would that make sense?

> A while ago I argued with one of the cabal, I suggested it would be silly
to put every record of a train timetable in a separate HTML file rather than
using e.g. a relational DB. In retrospect it doesn't seem quite so silly -
after all, each record is a legitimate resource...

Here using a microformat starts looking like a goal in itself. You could to
that, but is that necessary?

In many cases original information is already stored within a relational DB
(e.g., train schedules in the website of a train company). Would replacing
the relational DB by separate HTML files make looking for train schedules
any faster? 

P.S. Thanks, this suggestion is a good answer for universal storage of
microformats. Still, we will need something better than separate HTML files.
What would be other solutions? Pros / cons of using RDF?

Uldis

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Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 20:07:21 UTC