Web Pages and Linked Meta Data

When the web was young, there was a very good reason that HTML was structured so.  With just a few minutes instruction, one could produce a rich text web page.  Meta Data, was made optional, and "hidden" in a browser because it was only critical for engineering.  E-Mail "Full Headers" are still a mystery to some.  Lest we forget, Web Pages were designed to make certain people piles of money. This hidden headers model helps that process along too.  The assumption is that you don't own what you can't see.

Several ways of dealing with the special requirements of Meta Data have been developed in the meantime, RDF, RDFS, DC, SKOS, OWL, FOAF, etc..  Today, there is a different sort of "critical engineering" problem, and this time it affects web page authors.  The hidden header model is not such a good way to look at a web page any more.  Privacy issues lead to a reluctance to add linking data and the lack of connection to the abstractions OWL, SKOS etc. makes them less "author friendly". 

I have a word-processor to web page meta data centric model with an end to end validation test (by XSD). Since the "backbone" is HTML, the browser display is mostly unchanged. The document is a dctype "Dataset" the head is a skos:Collection of rdf:Properties and the body elements cite,address,abbr, etc. are all styled in a "Citation" class (or a "Redaction" class, because some people talk too much).  "Working" elements are marked as owl:sameAs to their respective rdf:Property or rdfs:Class, or DC Term in both the <head> and <body>.  This is a necessary first step to the solution of the Semantic Web Engineering problem now that Internet Web Pages are a fact. 

HTML 5, as proposed, uses the same basic hidden header document model.  And each section has particular instructions for conversion to RDF.  It is still solving the other web architecture engineering problem.

Normally I would just post this and let people find it.  However, since this is a fork from one of the earliest assumptions of the Internet ...

A fully worked example is available for the asking:
gannon_dick AT yahoo.com

--Gannon

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 22:24:32 UTC