Re: ODF and semantic web

Mark Birbeck wrote:

> GRDDL is a necessary hack to allow legacy mark-up to be made
> 'semantic'. But I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that you
> can build a 'semantic web' on such a flaky framework. Which means that
> it's not a good idea to design languages on the basis that 'it doesn't
> matter what I do, because I can always GRDDL it'.
> 
> So, I'm going to save my 'yey' for later. I'm hoping that there will
> be some serious coordination on this issue, and anything less is a
> missed opportunity.
 >
> It will be interesting to see if the two standards organisations can
> rise to the challenge.

It would have been even more "interesting" if the W3C in general and you 
in particular had shown some interest in this work 18 months ago (when 
the ODF Metadata Subcommittee was first created). I've regularly been 
posting notes about this work here, without apparent interest. Elias 
says he did similar with the RDFa group.

So I'm a little disappointed in your suggestion that we've gone wrong 
here, and that the complaint comes AFTER we've done all the work.

Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out among our group a suggestion of 
how we might put our head's together. I think adopting RDFa as is would 
be a non-starter ATM for the reasons Elias and I mentioned. But my sense 
is we could look to align the attribute names (are they now stable on 
your end??) and you might consider creating a namespaced set of 
attributes for inclusion in XML languages that need that (like ODF). 
That way we could at least at some point declare the ODF in-line 
metadata attributes a proper subset of RDFa.

For the record, I am not the chair of the Metadata Subcommittee; that 
would be Patrick Durusau.

Bruce

Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 14:23:35 UTC