Re: rdf AND rdf-a?

Michael Smethurst wrote:
>
> Morning all
>
> The site I'm working on uses microformats fairly heavily. And we've 
> encountered all the usual problems: accessibility, lack of namespacing 
> / scope etc. Anyway for accessibility reasons we've just updated our 
> standards to prohibit the use of the microformat abbreviation design 
> pattern (so most interesting microformats). This may change when we do 
> a little more testing but there's no date for that so it's looking 
> like microformats are bye-bye
>
> Pretty soon (honest) we'll be putting RDF views of the data live
>
> So my questions are:
>
> - if we have full RDF, should we also be using rdf-a?
>
> - if so what would be the benefits (yahoo search stuff?)?
>
> - and what would be the costs (ham-fisted html hackers wrecking the 
> templates springs to mind ;) )?
>
> any pointers much appreciated
>
> ta
>
> michael
>
>
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Micheal,

The main benefit of RDFa is that you broaden the scope of User Agent''s 
capable of discovering and generating RDF.  This is why I've suggested 
the following approaches to exposing Linked Data (at least one of the 4):

1 <link rel="alternate" .../> (you can do many things with the LINK 
tag's rel attribute which is commonly used for auto-discovery of content 
anyhow)

2.  Content Negotiation

3.  GRDDL

4.  RDFa

We just want to provide as many options as possible to the user agents 
seeking the raw data behind or associated with a given Web Page.

I would also encourage those developing user agents to include the 
options above into their RDF discovery process. On our part, our user 
agents (RDF Browsers, Sponger, and SPARQL processor) apply all 4 of the 
methods above, but we start off with Content Negotiation first, and then 
work our way down. Of course we also need to get our Browsers to 
remember options 2-3 where appropriate since they are themselves Web 
pages that may be consumed by other user agents that may only support 1 
of the options :-)

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2008 14:10:09 UTC