Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

In MySemanticProfile I use both RDFa and XHTML + RDF/XML using content
negotiation (N3/Turtle will be there at some point) plus it also contains
Microformats (when applicable).

I think that if your goal is to publish it to public, publish in all
formats, including CSV or vcard as long as there is at least one tool that
will potentially consume this information.

Now the question of why would somebody use any of the formats is a different
story and this question applies to every format including HTML (after all I
have a regular homepage so I don't need another HTML page to display data to
people, just to computers).

Thank you,

        Sergey


--
Sergey Chernyshev
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/


On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 7:09 AM, <bill.roberts@planet.nl> wrote:

>  I've been trying to weigh up the pros and cons of these two approaches to
> understand more clearly when you might want to use each.  I hope that the
> list members will be able to provide me with the benefit of their experience
> and insight!
>
> So the situation is that I have some information on a topic and I want to
> make it available both in machine readable form and in human readable form,
> for example a company wanting to publish information on its products, or a
> government department wanting to publish some statistics.
>
> I can either:
> 1) include 'human' and 'machine' representations in the same web page using
> RDFa
> 2) have an HTML representation and a separate RDF/XML representation (or N3
> or whatever) and decide which to provide via HTTP content negotiation.
>
> So which should I use? I suppose it depends on how the information will be
> produced, maintained and consumed.  Some generic requirements/wishes:
>
> - I only want to have one place where the data is managed.
> - I want people to be able to browse around a nicely formatted
> representation of the information, ie a regular web page, probably
> incorporating all sorts of other stuff as well as the data itself.
> - I don't want to type lots of XHTML or XML.
> - I want the data to be found and used by search engines and aggregators.
>
>
> The approach presented by Halb, Raimond and Hausenblas (
> http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2008/papers/06-halb-raimond-building-linked-data.pdf)
> seems attractive: to summarise crudely, auto-generate some RDFa from your
> database, but provide an RDF/XML dump too.
>
> On the other hand I find that RDFa leads to rather messy markup - I prefer
> the 'cleanliness' of the separate representations.
>
> For any non-trivial amount of data, then we will need a templating engine
> of some sort for either approach.  I suppose what may tip the balance is
> that Yahoo and Google are starting to make use of RDFa, but AFAIK they are
> not (yet) doing anything with "classic" content-negotiated linked data.
>
> Anyone care to argue for one approach or the other?  I suppose the answer
> may well be "it depends" :-)  But if so, what does it depend on?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Bill Roberts
>