Re: an RDFa publishing use case

Hi Bob,

This is indeed a good use-case. It's actually one that drove some of
the direction that RDFa took a year or so ago, since in discussions
with the IPTC it became clear that they needed to be able to add
metadata to a document as part of a workflow, in just the same way
that you have done. (Apparently you can start with a document that is
only a one line summary,  but it will grow significantly as it moves
through the process, passing from one department to another, and even
from one organisation to another.)

In addition the IPTC also needed to be able to say _who_ added that
metadata, and even give the metadata a relevance ranking. For example,
Reuters say that this article is about skiing with a 70% certainty,
whilst the BBC says this article is about skiing, with a 60%
certainty.

It's remiss of us to have forgetten one of the key use-cases,
particularly when it influenced some of the langauge design
decisions--so many thanks for providing an example. :)

(The IPTC actually use their own language, NITF, rather than XHTML,
but many of its metadata facilities were designed in parallel with
RDFa and it's at this level that there is a close similarity.)

Best regards,

Mark


On 15/12/06, Bob DuCharme <bob@snee.com> wrote:
>
> I'm submitting a use case that I believe demos both a new "what" and a new
> "how" for RDFa. The what: storing metadata about individual components of
> a published work, in particular, a magazine. When I threw some RDFa
> material into a presentation on XHTML 2 that the PRISM magazine metadata
> industry group had me do last spring, they were very receptive. (I think
> that XHTML 2's potentially greater structural richness will have more
> shops using XHTML 2 to store content--or at to transmit content to
> business partners--because it can hit a sweet spot between the flatness of
> XHTML 1 and the potential complexity of DocBook.) RDFa will make it easier
> to add metadata about discrete units of the document, typically as
> enclosed by section elements.
>
> The "how": Much of RDFa seems oriented toward exposing HTML PCDATA for use
> by triple-consuming software, and it's great at that. I think it's good at
> more than that, and this same use case is a good place to demonstrate
> this. Publisher metadata can be a little more meta (workflow information,
> rights re-use) and have nothing to do with the content from a reader's
> perspective. The fact that RDFa allows a block of out-of-line metadata to
> be grouped together in the /html/head element will fit well with publisher
> workflows. They can insert a block of relevant metadata into the header
> and send the whole thing off to the business partner.
>
> Ron Daniel's work as an original member of the PRISM group got them all
> interested in RDF, but RDF/XML, striping, etc. scared them off, and I
> think RDFa could win them back--it could be to RDF/XML what XML was to
> SGML in terms of simplifying things enough to make it easier for a wider
> variety of people to use.
>
> thanks,
>
> Bob DuCharme
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Use case: Foo Magazine ships content to aggregators and business partners
> using XHTML 2, because the greater structural possibilities over XHTML 1
> make it easier to group components of an article (e.g. pictures, recipes,
> sidebars of book excerpts) into individual elements of an XHTML file. They
> want to pull some content from their repository, and instead of sprinkling
> the metadata throughout the document, they want to insert a block of
> workflow and rights re-use metadata about the document and its components
> into a single point in the XHTML file and then ship the document off to a
> business partner. (Many schemas have a header element separate from the
> body element so that the header element can be a placeholder for document
> metadata; it's a natural place for it.) The sample XML shown here has a
> little metadata about the document itself, a little about one subcomponent
> (a recipe) and a little about a subcomponent of that, a picture within the
> recipe.
>
>   <html xmlns:fm="http://www.foomagazine.com/ns/xyz"
>         xmlns:pr="http://prismstandard.org/1.0#"
>         xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/">
>     <head>
>       <meta property='fm:newsStandDate='2006-04-03'/>
>       <meta property='pr:coverDate='2007-02-24'/>
>       <meta about="#recipe13941">
>         <meta property="fm:ComponentID">XZ3214</meta>
>         <meta property="fm:ComponentType">Recipe</meta>
>         <meta property="fm:RecipeID">r003423</meta>
>       </meta>
>       <meta about="#pic9932">
>         <meta property="dc:creator">Joe Smith</meta>
>         <meta property="pr:embargoDate">2007-03-12</meta>
>       </meta>
>     </head>
>     <body>
>       <h>Add Some Tex Mex Sizzle to Your Kid's Lunch</h>
>       <section id='recipe22143'>
>         <h>Amigo Corn Dogs</h>
>         <img id="pic9932" src="http://www.foomagazine.com/img/342.jpg"/>
>         <!-- li, p, etc. -->
>       </section>
>       <section id='recipe13941'>
>         <h>EZ Bean Tacos</h>
>         <!-- li, p, etc. -->
>       </section>
>       <!-- more content -->
>     </body>
>   </html>
>
>
>
>


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Received on Friday, 15 December 2006 08:49:29 UTC