Re: Sprinkling POWDER on metaTXT

Hi folks,

Our MetaTXT work is at an early stage and we are open to all useful  
suggestions.

As a W3C AC representative, I was hoping to make the evolution of  
MetaTXT as aligned with W3C endorsed approaches as possible.  Thus I  
was very happy to talk to Phil about the potential synergies between  
it and POWDER.  As Stasinos has suggested it may well make sense to  
use an automated converter - and allow consumers to use a textual  
form or a POWDER form as they wish - and possibly in OWL/RDF forms  
for good measure.  I have not yet had the opportunity to discuss  
these opportunities in great detail with others involved in MetaTXT,  
but I had already been raising the issue of moving away from a pure  
text format, as initially outlined, for flexibility.

POWDER, as a generic mechanism for specifying metadata for online  
resources, may be well suited for use in this task.... so we may be  
able to be a good example of POWDER in deployment if things go right  
for us.

The working group on MetaTXT is being launched at Mobile Asia  
Congress [1] in Macau as we speak [2].  The initial members are dawn  
mainly from the mobile search community, with a strong  
telecommunications culture.  We anticipate public follow-on activity  
as Mobile World Congress [3] in Barcelona in Feb 2009.

The activity is managed by my institution, the TSSG in Waterford  
Institute of Technology [4], and one our cluster of technology- 
related companies "visibility mobile" [5].  The draft specification  
of MetaTXT, described in a white paper, is available as a PDF [6].

The success or failure of MetaTXT will depend ultimately on its  
adoption by the mobile search engines, and by the mobile sites that  
want to be indexed by these search engines.  Thus I do not want to  
alienate this community by seeming too technical or too  idealistic  
rather than pragmatic.  However, despite that caveat, I do think  
there is an opportunity to try POWDER for this purpose and see how  
well it works.... I will keep the W3C POWDER email list informed of  
our progress (or lack of :-).

Thanks,
Mícheál

[1] http://www.mobileasiacongress.com/
[2] http://www.prlog.org/10115449-visibility-mobile-rescuing-the- 
mobile-internet.html
[3] http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/
[4] http://www.tssg.org
[5] http://www.visibilitymobile.com
[6] http://visibilitymobile.com/Whitepaper_On_MetaTXT.pdf

On 18 Nov 2008, at 19:22, Stasinos Konstantopoulos wrote:

> 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
>



---
Mícheál Ó Foghlú,                    		    	<Tel: +353 51 302963>
Executive Director Research,       	<Mob: +353 86 8044640>
Telecommunications Software     	<Fax: +353 51 341100>
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Waterford Institute of Technology, 		<http://www.tssg.org>
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