- From: <bill.roberts@planet.nl>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:09:32 +0200
- To: <public-lod@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <09584178D434304885A073316C800D0C15113F0A@CPEXBE-EML13.kpnsp.local>
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
Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:45:58 UTC