Microformat profile URIs

A problem with applying GRDDL to existing microformat data is that the
majority of documents don't have profile URIs. Try [1].

Clearly this is in part this is due to few of the microformats having
been assigned profile URIs, presumably also through publishers not
using the URIs that have been assigned.  This does have immediate,
practical impact on the reach of GRDDL - aside from the generic XHTML
data-view, the transformations are associated with these URIs, so the
lack of profile URI means with the current mechanisms, none of the
domain-specific data is automatically available in RDF.

I believe this points to two issues that should probably concern this
WG: 1. how to get URIs associated with the microformats; 2. how to
deal with documents which lack profile URIs.

1. Given that the microformats community has agreed in principle [2]
that each microformat should have a URI, this becomes the question of
how to encourage a follow-through on this, getting the URIs minted.

Ryan King offered [3] the following reasons for why there aren't more
profile URIs:
[[
1. We want some degree of stability first.
2. There are more important things to work on and the microformats
can grow and evolve without profiles. (if you disagree, you're more
than welcome to volunteer to help with the profile URIs :D)
]]

Neither of these seems a blocker for getting URIs minted. At [2] there
are some candidate domains -  microformats.org, www.w3.org, xmdp.org
to which I'd add purl.org

I honestly don't know the best approach, but as microformat authoring
tools are appearing fairly rapidly, any action that might encourage
the microformats folks to get URIs in place soon would be a good idea.

2. Dealing with microformat data which lacks a profile URI is a
different story. Right now it involves essentially scraping for
attribute strings like "vevent". Seems to me there are two general
strategies: raise the status of these strings to registered
identifiers (presumably e.g. class="vevent" is relatively unlikely to
appear in non-microformat docs); find a way to express the information
that any data extracted from the document was done so without the
license the profile URIs provides.

Arguably in practice it might make sense to simply apply the
appropriate transformations an gather the triples anyhow. DanC noted
(in chat) the use or republication of such triples would be with the
understanding that the authority for such triples would then be on the
user or republisher. To me this seems undesirable as it involves
information loss (the existence or otherwise of the original profile
license). But given that many microformat docs will need
pre-processing to XHTML, and capturing a chain of such transformations
as a GRDDL profile seems overkill, I'm not sure this is something
worth losing sleep over...

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://kitchen.technorati.com/search/
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/profile-uris
[3] http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-July/004769.html

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Friday, 18 August 2006 08:06:46 UTC