Re: Role of RDFa in 2016

Dear Kevin, dear all,

what people in the Semantic Web world occasionally tend to forget is the  
continued dominance of XML(-based formats) for the purpose of textual  
markup, and also that there are communities/applications with a  
near-exclusive focus on XML. Consider the role of TEI in Digital  
Humanities and XML-based formats in the publishing industry. In this  
context, RDFa is a much more natural choice than JSON-LD and will continue  
to be for the foreseeable future.*

As for myself, I recently infused some RDFa in the Jekyll templates of the  
Universal Dependencies project to get a machine-readable representation of  
annotation guidelines that people are writing in Markdown. A nice use case  
because we get an up-to-date OWL2 ontology from (the RDFa embedded in)  
these guidelines even though the authors are not necessarily aware of the  
Semantic Web, but may have a background in, say, linguistics. I did not  
have to touch the original workflow, though, so, from the perspective of  
authors, nothing changed to the way they edited their documentation  
before, but we now have ontologies for linguistic annotations that can be  
used for NLP and NLP-based applications for some 40 languages.

Best,
Christian

* Having that said, I also have to note that Linked Data is only beginning  
to establish itself in Digital Humanities. It is quickly gaining ground,  
but a key factor that hampered progress is the dominance of TEI and the  
lack of a sound TEI-approved representation of Linked Data (or of  
references to LOD resources -- but people are working on that, including  
myself). Yet, among the more popular RDF serializations, RDFa is the most  
likely source of inspiration (if not the model) for TEI-LOD integration.

Am .10.2016, 04:31 Uhr, schrieb Kevin Ford <kefo@3windmills.com>:

> Dear All,
>
> Although I feel like I will be flamed for this question, I was  
> interested in hearing some opinions about the role of RDFa vs JSON-LD  
> (embedded in the HTML header, let's say) in HTML now that the latter has  
> become more accepted, at least when it comes to one major search engine.  
>   Has that weakened the use case for, or role of, RDFa?
>
> To ask a broad question: Who/What consumers make regular use of RDFa  
> (because there is no alternate/easy serialization to obtain)?
>
> To ask a slightly more targeted question, if you publish a data service  
> that responds to content-negotiation (and which can embed JSON-LD in the  
> header and which can also provide rel="alternate" links in the header),  
> is it reasonable to conclude that RDFa is overkill in such a scenario?
>
> I recognize the use case for RDFa is much deeper than search engines,  
> but I also suspect that in most cases when a service publishes RDFa in  
> the HTML, that same service likely has made a 'cleaner' alternate  
> serialization available.
>
> --Kevin
>
>


-- 
Prof. Dr. Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chiarcos@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
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Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2016 15:56:32 UTC