Re: Sprinkling POWDER on metaTXT

It seems to me that one can get almost all of what is good in both approaches.
Please read on.


> POWDER: Well-formed and highly expressive format, encompassing RDF, but takes a while to compose.
> metaTXT: Simple free-form text, uncomplicated syntax, takes just a minute to create.

Good reason to write a metaTXT -> POWDER converter, which can't take
more than a couple of hours to implement. Then one can write a metaTXT
in a minute
and publish POWDER in 1'10''

It is also a good use case for POWDER-BASE: one can derive a POWDER/metaTXT
extension which, for one, only allows <includehosts/> in irisets,
which one wouldn't have
been able to do if we didn't have the POWDER-BASE layer.

> POWDER: Descriptions can be located anywhere, so there needs to be a discovery process, which could be complex.
> metaTXT: Data is always located at the root of the site that it describes.

One can imagine metaTXT adding a powder: field, which points to a
richer/finer description of the same site, for the benefit of engines
that can and want to
follow it up. One can also imagine a POWDER authoring tool that automatically
exports the metaTXT-representible metadata in metaTXT and adds a powder:
field pointing to the full POWDER description.

> POWDER: Generic description capability, not intended for just one or a few use cases.
> metaTXT: Focussed use case, and includes specific support for mobile entry points into sites.

POWDER defines the mechanism for creating focused extensions that
restrict POWDER expressivity. These derived formalisms can be be more
efficiently
parsed by focused tools, while at the same time retaining the ability
to translate
to POWDER or OWL/RDF for the benefit of generic tools.

stasinos

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 19:31:48 UTC