Re: Linking HTML pages and data

Hi Sean,

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Sean Bechhofer
<sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> A simple (possibly dumb) question. Is there a standard mechanism for linking
> an HTML page to the non-information resource that it describes?

Not a dumb question at all--at least for me :-)

I've been using the <link> pattern that Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak
and Tom Heath documented in How To Publish Linked Data On The Web [1]
for discovery of RDF documents that are related to a given HTML
document.

But you are asking about the relation between a document and the the
*thing* being described. I agree with Damien that foaf:primaryTopic
seems like it could work, and that one possibility would be to slip a
bit of RDFa into the HTML document that asserted:

  <> foaf:primaryTopic <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mogwai_(band)> .

I also agree w/ Kingsley that it would be neat to also have a <link>
pattern that non-RDFa folks could use:

  <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/primaryTopic"
href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mogwai_(band)" title="Mogwai" />

Or if mnot's Web Linking RFC is approved it would open the door to
using the Link HTTP Header:

  Link: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mogwai_(band)>;
rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/primaryTopic"; title="Mogwai"

Registering [3] primaryTopic as a link relation type would tighten it
up a bit, as well as help advertise the pattern.

  <link rel="primaryTopic"
href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mogwai_(band)" title="Mogwai" />

At any rate, I'd be interested to hear if other people have other
approaches to this. It would be nice to have a little recipe (w3c
note?) people could follow when making these sorts of assertions on
the web. Assuming one isn't there already of course :-)

//Ed

PS. the oai-ore folks had a similar use case to link descriptions to
the thing being described. They ended up creating a new term
oai:describes [4], and documented ways of layering assertions into rdf
[5], atom [6] and html [7] documents. I think the vocabulary is
probably too specific to aggregations and resource maps to be useful
in the general case you are talking about though.

PSS. I really just wanted to type Mogwai a bunch of times :-)

[1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/#discovery
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07#section-6.2
[4] http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/vocabulary#ore-describes
[5] http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/rdfxml#remtoaggr
[6] http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/atom#metadata
[7] http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/discovery#HTMLLinkElement

Received on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 19:43:09 UTC