Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

Mark- Beautifully put. +1 on a hopefully accelerating trend towards
simplicity and ease of adoption. - BPA

Bradley P. Allen
http://bradleypallen.org
+1 310 951 4300



On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Mark
Birbeck<mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com> wrote:
> Hi Kingsley,
>
>> If you are comfortable producing (X)HTML documents, then simply use RDFa and
>> terms from relevant vocabularies to describe yourself, your needs, your
>> offerings, and other things, clearly. Once you've done that, simply leave
>> the Web to do the REST :-)
>>
>> Everything else is a technical detail (imho).
>
> But that isn't the discussion we're having, IMHO.
>
> We're not talking about how you or I might do it -- people comfortable
> with .htaccess files, server configuration, and so on.
>
> My understanding of the discussion that was going on, is that whilst
> we all want to see the semantic web succeed (even if we all have a
> different view of what the semantic web is), we're asking how exactly
> it is that we can achieve it.
>
> And for years, the solutions proposed have been somewhat mysterious;
> RDF/XML, SPARQL end-points, N3, content negotiation, 303s, and so on.
>
> You have to ask yourself at some point, do we want the data, or don't
> we -- do we want people to publish stuff that we 'semwebbers' can use?
> And if we do want it, then let's help them publish it.
>
> I may be biased because I've had my nose pressed up against it for too
> many years, but I believe that in this regards, RDFa is a
> game-changer.
>
> It's not GRDDL, which says 'publish whatever the hell you like and
> we'll convert it'. It's not microformats, which says, 'here are a
> handful of centralised vocabularies, for use on a decentralised web'.
> And it's not RDF/XML, which requires you to take apart your server and
> put it back together again.
>
> It's HTML.
>
> And everyone knows at least one way to publish HTML, don't they?
>
> In the years that I've been involved with the RDFa work, the mental
> model I have always had, is of someone using Blogger or Drupal or
> something just as simple, to publish RDF. That's now possible with
> RDFa, and what's even more exciting, Yahoo! and Google will pick it
> up.
>
> I realise I'm sounding like an evangelist (no doubt because I am one). :)
>
> But my suggestion would be that we have a window of opportunity here,
> to create a semantic infrastructure that is indistinguishable from the
> web itself; the more metadata we can get into HTML-space, the more
> likely we are to bring about a more 'semantic' web...before anyone
> notices. ;)
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Birbeck, webBackplane
>
> mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com
>
> http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
>
> webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
> 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
> London, EC2A 4RR)
>
>

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 22:49:17 UTC