Re: RDFa FAQ comments and activities

On 3/11/07, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:
>
> Simone,
>
> Thanks for the very useful feedback. Some thoughts below.

Thanks for consideration Ben.

[cut]

> I am wary of such an aggressive semantic web pitch. RDFa alone doesn't
> do this for you and, in fact, it's questionable whether all of the
> semweb technologies (RDF, SPARQL, etc...) do this yet.
>
> We don't need people to buy into the whole semweb vision to use RDFa. We
> want people to start using RDFa for a very simple reason: data
> interoperability and "sprinkling structure into existing web pages."
> That's useful right now.

[cut]

> same worry as above: you could replace RDFa with "RDF" in the above
> paragraph, and it would still work. In other words, the advantages of
> RDFa are not clear: why embed RDF in HTML? Because what we really want
> is to augment the *existing* web with structure. So you can right-click
> a link and ask "what does this link represent? an endorsement? an
> insult? a copyright license?"

You're right Ben, so the paragraph describes "good" Semantic Web and
this is the subject of document I wrote: an indroduction to Semantic
Web in general. Closing focus on RDFa maybe off topic. I know that
RDFa it's a block of whole Semantic Web (like a Lego block on a full
building). And I must not forget that this is only a part. Can I try
again?

Interesting on Semantic Web, as an evolution and one of the best
implementation of actual Web, I read Semantic Web Road Map by Tim
Berners-Lee [1]:

"The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it
should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that
machines would be able to participate and help."

Good, this is a good description of whole Semantic Web, and I've used
as epigraph on my document. Well, the phrase (from Tim's text) after
this is:

"One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most
information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if
it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least
some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not
evident to a robot browsing the web."

I think this is the point respect RDFa. RDFa has the power of an
integration of Semantic Layer in (X)HTML document (and it is the best
way, like we talk earlier in Mailing List). RDFa can broke the "major
obstacles". A document readable by Humans and Machines BOTH. And this
is the reason because i like RDFa and interested also to GRDDL, eRDF
and Microformats. :)

> I really appreciate your feedback on all of this. Any additional
> feedback is always welcome!

Thanks again, so I'll travelling for work all this week but I've
printed all RDFa related documents to other, I hope useful, comments.
For wiki updates, can I use my account on W3 site?

Now It's night in Rome and good night to all,

> -Ben

Simone

[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html

Received on Sunday, 11 March 2007 23:16:19 UTC