RE: Additional Examples for RDF/A Primer

Hi Dan,

I'm sure your email arrived before I'd even finished pressing send! ;)

> > We are in the process of adding some more examples to the RDF/A 
> > primer. [...]
> 
> Sounds fun, I look forward to seeing it.

I don't know if I did something wrong, but although I attached the draft,
and can see that it is simply inline text on the end of your reply email.
Was that me, you or the mailing-list?


> > The goal of these additional examples is to provide a very basic 
> > introduction for new users, and so help someone who might know a 
> > little HTML to create something like their own FoaF page. However, 
> > some tricky things do emerge when trying to use FoaF to represent 
> > contact information at a simple level.
> 
> If there are any tweaks we can make to FOAF that improve this 
> situation, ... it's not set in stone.

What I'm thinking is that FoaF has some great things in but they bring with
it the RDF baggage. (No offence, but you know what I mean....) When I was
working through the examples I found that for very basic stuff I just wanted
to say, here's a phone number and here's an email address. So for _some_ use
cases, it seemed that using FoaF as a fairly flat vocabulary was useful.


> > The most difficult issue is that FoaF does not allow a 
> person to be a 
> > document
> 
> Heh, you just got me thinking about tattoos.

He he! It's lucky we have guys like you around to think off the edge of the
paper and back round the other side.


> Parts of people 
> might be documents, I'd suggest. But people themselves, 
> aren't documents. It isn't that FOAF itself disallows people 
> being documents; that's something the external universe aka 
> reality enforces. FOAF merely reflects that aspect of reality 
> into it's little cartoon model of life.
> FOAF doesn't let you describe something as being both a 
> person and a document, without being flagged as making a 
> contradictory claim.

Yes, I accept that, and wouldn't like to be responsible for creating a false
reality. ;)

But my way out of this is to have lots of terms in the entry level part of
FoaF that can be used without implying 'personhood'. Hence 'something has a
phone number of abc' is all you can glean from this page, until you know
more. But since we as humans fill in the gaps, that's plenty to get some
useful things done (and for our entry level).


> 	..which is understandable, but raises the entry level 
> to RDF/A for
> > a new user just that bit too high. (I'm making the 
> assumption that the 
> > first use that most non-RDF people would have for this 
> would be to tag 
> > up their blog, yet currently to use FoaF they would have to 
> create an 
> > anonymous node to make the distinction between the 
> foaf:Person and a 
> > foaf:Document.)
> 
> The Person node needn't be anonymous/blank (although many do 
> follow that style). It just needs to be distinct from the document. 

Yes, so you end up creating an element with an @about on it, to make that
distinction, but unfortunately it's not something that would be immediately
obvious to people as to why.


> > 
> > For now I have got round this by not actually putting information 
> > about a home-page into the FoaF file. This means that a 'realistic' 
> > first document for a new RDF/A user can be something as 
> simple as this 
> > (this is from the attached document):
> > 
> >   <html xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
> >     <head>
> >       <title>Jo Lamda's Home Page</title>
> >     </head>
> >     <body>
> >       <p>
> >         Hello. This is <span property="foaf:name">Jo Lamda</span>'s
> >         home page.
> 
> What thing has the foaf:name property here? A Person or a doc part?

Well, taken in isolation, the thing identified by the URI of the document.
At this stage it has no type, since according to FoaF, *anything* can have a
foaf:name. I did this on purpose, to get the elusive low entry level. If you
want to use foaf:surname, and whatever applies to foaf:Person you would need
to create this 'distinct node' that you're referring to. I don't have a
problem with introducing more advanced concepts like that, at some point,
provided we have already given people a very easy way in.


> I can see the trickyness if we want to make explicit that 
> we're really talking about a person, not a part of a 
> document. We'll get the same issue if we're marking up job 
> adverts, ebay-style listings etc too, of course --- this 
> isn't a particularly FOAF-related problem.

Of course, although what I'm playing around with is combination of a low
'entry level' for a new RDF/A person, with the 'knowledge' that a specific
application might have. So if I tell eBay to go retrieve a listing from my
home-page and give it a URL, even if my home-page doesn't contain
rdf:type="ebay:listing", but it does contain the title "Dell laptop" and a
tagged up price, the system could make use of the data.

Obviously, if you then go on to create these 'distinct nodes' then you could
have FoaF, eBay listings and so on, all on the same page. Your blog then
becomes a very easy mechanism for maintaining all sorts of stuff, but that
would be the 'next level' for our potential authors.

> >         <h2>Work</h2>
> >         If you want to contact me at work, you can
> >         either <a rel="foaf:mbox" 
> href="mailto:jo.lambda@example.org">email
> >         me</a>, or call <span property="foaf:phone">+1 777 
> 888 9999</span>.
> 
> can we make the phone number be a URI/hyperlink? tel: URI, or 
> whatever?

I planned to do that in a later step, since I was trying to start with what
someone with not a lot of HTML knowledge might do. (I'll also look out some
Skype, etc., links too, to make it a bit more up-to-date.)


> 
> 
> >       </p>
> >     </body>
> >   </html>
> 
> 
> I'm still clumsy at reading RDF/A --- is a list of the 
> equivalent triples, or a graphical representation, available anywhere?
> 
> (ah, i see it below... In which case, I realise I'm out of 
> touch with RDF/A snytax, since I didn't realise it created 
> those triples from this markup).
> 
> > 
> > (Jo is Joe Lamda's sister...)
> 
> I suggest changing her name since the two are 
> indistinguishable when read aloud, eg. in a teleconference, 
> or in a talk, or by screen-readers.

Good idea.


> > Personally, I think this is acceptable (assuming I've got my syntax 
> > right), since in this triple-store there is no conflict between the 
> > URL of the home-page, and the identifier of the object that 
> owns that 
> > home-page (which incidentally is *not* a foaf:Person at this point).
> 
> Yup. 

And I was also thinking that if the person who just imported the RDF/A
wanted to add the fact that this was a person, rather than a company, they
could do so, since as long as the 'record' is not identified with the same
URI, everything is sufficiently compartmentalised:

  [
    rdf:type foaf:Person;
    foaf:name "Jo Lamda";
    foaf:mbox "mailto:jo.lambda@example.org";
    foaf:phone "+1 777 888 9999";
    foaf:homepage <http://jo-lamda.blogspot.com/>
  ] .

It would mean that the contact management system would need to know where it
got each set of triples from, so it knew which ones came from outside and
which were typed in, but I believe that most triple stores would be able to
handle that.


> The properties used might btw *imply* that the resource is a 
> foaf:Person, or at least a foaf:Agent... and that little 
> piece of RDFS/OWL processing could very feasibly be done by 
> an addressbook reading/parsing/loading the RDF/A.

Exactly! That was why I was using foaf:name rather than foaf:surname, etc.,
since that doesn't imply anything.


> > I'm hoping this starts to show how we might make use of all this 
> > stuff, so any comments gratefully received, particularly on the way 
> > that FoaF is being used.
> 
> I'll try to help...

Excellent...thanks.


> Couple practical questions 
> 
>  - is there an RDF/A parser ready yet? (XSLT or whatever)

Jeremy is pretty close, I believe.


>  - where's the Primer draft? is it W3C Member-only?

No, it was posted in a recent email to the list. The HTML is here:

  <http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-primer>


Most people seem to be getting better results using the XML version, which
contains a link to an XSLT stylesheet (so a suitable browser would be
needed:

  <http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-primer.xml>

Thanks for your comments Dan.

All the best,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port.net Ltd.

e: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/
w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/

Download our XForms processor from
http://www.formsPlayer.com/

Received on Friday, 13 January 2006 00:31:16 UTC