RE: web of data: how to include forms?

> Beside "href" links, forms are an important feature of the 
> hypertext web. How does this translate to the web of data? 
> How would you include "forms" in an RDF document? Is there a 
> standard way to do it? An ontology describing forms?
> 
> The purpose would to enable a Tabulator-like application to 
> know when it has to display a form to the user.
> 
> [Why do I ask? I'm prototyping a car repair application 
> including diagnostic and technical documentation. It's 
> supposed to be used by humans and programs.
> Conceptually, acces to the technical documentation looks very 
> much like navigating a web of data. But forms cannot be 
> avoided: for instance, the application may have to ask for 
> technical characteristics of the car being repaired (in order 
> to filter accordingly the list of documents to be returned) ; 
> a user may have to enter results of diagnostic tests.]

IMHO, I am not sure there is a need for RDF-form.  Form is used to send
something to a particular server. In other words, it is application
dependent.  For instance, a simple login form ask your username and password
because it will be passed to the server as query parameters something like

username=xyz&password=abc

But different web application can use different name tag, a particular
server can do something like this as well,

uname=xyz&pswd=abc

Of course, we can standardize the vocabulary of username and password, so
everyone will describe their login like

_:someone ex:username "xyz";
          ex:password "abc".

But to send this "form", if you insist to call so, to someone who needs to
process it, you still need to know how they have designed their HTTP API,
right? In your case, you would describe your request with an ontology
between you and the repaired shop.  Then, wrap it in a HTTP form request
through the shop's web server or any kind Web service interface they
provide. But what can an RDF form do to help you? 

HTML is a presentation langague to interact with humans, and RDF is
description language used for machines. We cannot mess them up. 

Xiaoshu

Received on Thursday, 11 January 2007 17:15:56 UTC