Re: Discobits: an ontology for describing the structure of documents

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> [...]
>
> What if instead we thought about documents as a series of objects with
> properties? You don't add some text, highlight it, and give a "heading
> 1" style or bold, but rather you insert a section. That section has a
> title property, as well as any number of additional (RDF encoded)
> properties.
That's exactly how the discobits editor in meant to be used. For example
the document at http://discobits.org/ doesn't use XHTML for formatting
except for a few line-breaks. The titles are shown as headers because of
the structural properties of the resource which is expressed exclusively
in RDF.

It would be nice to improve the editor to allow adding and editing
arbitrary properties.
>
> I blogged about this awhile back:
>
> <http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/09/16/semantic-documents>
>
I like the approach of dropping all markup in favor of  the description
in RDF. It was a pragmatic decision for the Editor to have individual
small bits of content as XML elements with XHTML. If the class
http://discobits.org/ontology#XHTMLInfoDiscoBit really belongs into
DiscoBits or should rather be in an extension vocabulary is a different
question.
> That said, one of my colleagues on the ODF metadata SC was looking for
> an ontology to describe structured documents, so I'll be sure to
> forward your note to him. 
thanks!

reto