Re: Let's drop RDFa in the requirements !

Hi Maxime,
Some comments below:

On 27/04/2012 15:57, Maxime Lefrançois wrote:
> Hi,
>
> in mail 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-multilingualweb-lt/2012Apr/0131.html, 
> I wrote a possible RDFa markup to represent the fact that "a fragment 
> of text is identified as a named entity". I stressed that there is a 
> shift of meaning : the meaning using RDFa is: "there is a resource in 
> the document that its:lexicalizes a named entity, and that has for 
> its:value in english some fragment of text".
>
> Actually, there will always be a shift of meaning if we are to use 
> RDFa, and this is a strong conceptualization incompatibility between 
> ITS and RDF. In fact, in ITS one annotates fragments of text 
> (litterals), but in RDF litterals can't be subject of a triple. As 
> simple as that.
>

But does wrapping the litteral in a span and then adding an id attribute 
to that not make it dereferencable and then therefore the potential 
subject of a triple?

> So other RDF models could exist to represent the simple fact that "a 
> fragment of text is identified as a named entity", depending on the 
> model choosen to represent ITS 2.0 with semantic web formalisms. What 
> is the desirable semantic web model for ITS 2.0 ? What are the pros 
> and cons of each ?
>
> I think that the MLW-LT XG should not bother with RDFa at all, for 
> three main reasons:
>
> 1- I don't see any requirement that explicitly asks for semantic web
> 2- It may be extremely confusing to have different conceptualization 
> in the same recommendation
> 3- This is typically the kind of conceptualization decision about 
> lexical resources that the Multilingual Semantic Web Community Group 
> will shortly have to face, and I don't think it's a really good idea 
> to choose a semantic web model for ITS 2.0 too early as it might be 
> incompatible with their requirements.
>

I agree that the objective of ITS isn't to add knowledge to the semantic 
web per se. Neither is it clear that OWL-based reasoning, or even RDFS 
inference addresses any real use cases in the ITS problem area. However, 
RDFa is an established model for annotating HTML with meta-data and for 
using such meta-data to make meaningful links to external resources. 
These are both recurring ITS requirements.

So the question is why would we introduce a different meta-data 
mechanism for HTML if RDFa is sufficient and possibly already benefiting 
from existing tools and data management support?

However, we should definitely engage with the MLSW community on this. 
Are there some key representative that we should be aiming to attract 
for the MLW-LOD workshop?

cheers,
Dave

> So I suggest we drop RDFa in the requirements (delete the two lines 
> that speak about RDFa ), and let's let the Multilingual Semantic Web 
> Community Group deal with the semantic web, the mapping of ITS 
> annotated XML documents into RDF, and the mapping between its-* 
> attributes and RDFa.
>
> Regards,
> Maxime Lefrançois
> Ph.D. Student, INRIA - WIMMICS Team
> http://maxime-lefrancois.info <http://maxime-lefrancois.info/>
> @Max_Lefrancois <http://twitter.com/Max_Lefrancois>
>