Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

Bill,

It will certainly not surprise you that I'd suggest to go for (technically
speaking) linked data with RDFa. However, we have sort of started to collect
a checklist you might want to review [1].

> 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?

Can depend, in my experience, for example on:

 + granularity (fine-grained, multidimensional statistical data vs. DC
author/title thing)
 + dynamics (is it a one-shot or does the data change with time like on a
blog, etc.)


Cheers,
      Michael

[1] http://ld2sd.deri.org/lod-ng-tutorial/#checklist
[2] http://linkeddata.deri.ie/services

-- 
Dr. Michael Hausenblas
LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
http://sw-app.org/about.html



> From: <bill.roberts@planet.nl>
> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:09:32 +0200
> To: Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>
> Subject: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation
> Resent-From: Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>
> Resent-Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:45:59 +0000
> 
> 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-d
> ata.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 13:00:23 UTC