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

Hi Martin,

2009/6/29 Martin Hepp (UniBW) <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>:
> Hi Tom:
>
>>Amen. Thank you for writing this. I completely agree. RDFa has some
>>great use cases but (like any technology) has its limitations. Let's
>>not oversell it.
>
> We seem to agree on the observation, but not on the conclusion. What I want
> and suggest is using RDFa also for exchanging a bit more complex RDF models
> / data by simply using a lot of div / span or whatever elements that
> represent the RDF part in the SAME document BUT NOT too closely linked with
> the presentation level.
>
> <body>
> <h1>This is the car I want to sell</h1>
> Actually, a pretty cool car, for only $1.000. Offer valid through July 31,
> 2009
>
> <span>
> ... my whole RDF in RDFa
>  </span>
> <body>
>
> The advantage of that would be that
>
> - you just have to maintain ONE file,
> - data and metadata are close by, so the likelihood of being up to date
> increases, and
> - at the same time, the code does not get too messy.
> - Also - no problems setting up the server (*).
> - Easy to create on-line tools that generate RDFa snippets for simple
> pasting.
> - Yahoo and Google will most likely honor RDFa meta-data only.
>
> Also note that often the literal values will be in content attributes
> anyway, because the string for the presentation is not suitable as meta-data
> content anyway (e.g.  dates, country codes,...)
>
> I think the approach sketched above would be a cheap and useful way of
> publishing RDF meta-data. It could work with CMS / blogging software etc.
> Imaging if we were able to allow eBay sellers to put GoodRelations meta-data
> directly into the open XHTML part of their product description.
>
> The main problem with my proposal is that there is the risk that Google
> considers this "cloaking" and may remove respective resources from their
> index (Mark raised that issue). If that risk was confirmed, we would really
> have a problem. Imagine me selling Semantic Web markup as a step beyond SEO
> ... and the first consequence of following my advice is being removed from
> the Google index.
>
> A second problem is that if the document contains nodes that have no
> counterpart on the presentation level (e.g. intermediate nodes for holding
> n-ary relations), then they will also not be dereferencable. The same holds
> for URIs or  nodes that are outside the scope of the actual RDFa / XHTML
> document - I see no simple way of serving neither XHTML nor RDF content for
> those.

These are exactly the reasons why I emphasise the limitations and ask
that we don't oversell the capabilities of any technology, RDFa
included.

Tom.

Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 12:00:52 UTC