RE: We need to start building a community (Re: Primer updated with a Changes section)

Finally something I can contribute to! It is like me watching cricket, I
don't really know all the rules and when it gets down to the details I feel
awash in an ocean... I have been reading all the details of syntax and
chaining and had no idea what I could add.

Anyway, I blog for SitePoint [1] and have recently had a number of entries
[2] [3] on embedded metadata where I mention RDFa and microformats. I have a
number of articles in various editing stages and would be happy to chat with
you all about where you think the main aims should be.

SitePoint is great for the fact that the main audience are Web developers
who want to do the right thing, CSS, HTML and microformats are their bread
and butter. It is a great venue to discuss linked data, Semantic Web and my
personal favourite, RDFa.

I am sure I could convince the editors to do an RDFa article, especially
since it looks set to be a W3C Recommendation soon (at least I think --
correct me if I am wrong).

So, after all that ;), I am glad to see that some of you have pointed to
community building. That is the missing piece to the great system you all
have worked so hard to build. And one were I can actually add something to.

I am basically looking for some ideas that you might have or resources
(written for non-experts) that I can point to.

The basic blog entries I have started on are:

* You can invent your own vocabulary and new search engines (like Yahoo
microsearch [2]) can instantly index them, with microformats a new parser
needs to be built for every new microformat.

* RDFa works extremely well with the idea of linked data (of course) so its
use in data portability applications is a great fit.

Cheers,

David Peterson
URI: http://id.boab.info/david
blog: http://www.sitepoint.com/articlelist/497

Systems Architect
BoaB interactive Pty Ltd
http://boab.info


[1] David's blog on SitePoint
http://www.sitepoint.com/articlelist/497

[2] Yahoo microsearch
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/02/22/one-small-step-for-yahoo-one-giant
-leap-for-embedded-metadata/

[3] Structured Data embedded in Web pages
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/02/22/structured-data-set-to-take-on-goo
gle/



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rdf-in-
> xhtml-tf-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Manu Sporny
> Sent: Saturday, 8 March 2008 2:35 AM
> To: RDFa
> Subject: We need to start building a community (Re: Primer updated with
> a Changes section)
> 
> 
> Mark Birbeck wrote:
> > Or we might decide that we want a document that walks the reader
> > through lots of worked examples, and so helps people get up and
> > running quickly. If so, maybe that's a standalone document in its own
> > right, independent of some 'simplified syntax', that provides the
> > walkthroughs, and nothing more? (In other words, maybe we need
> > separate documents for "RDFa Syntax Primer" and "RDFa Primer".)
> 
> I don't think more pages like the Primer or Syntax document is going to
> fix this particular set of issues.
> 
> We need a wiki - a good wiki that is open to the public to edit. We
> also
> need public community mailing lists. We need to start thinking about
> building a community around RDFa. There are not enough of us to address
> all of these education issues and the rest of the issues to come.
> 
> We can't keep depending on W3C documents to educate the everyday web
> developer.
> 
> One must only look to the Microformats community to see a good example
> of how to get a community started. It would be good to model the RDFa
> community from the things that the Microformats community got right:
> 
> - Their main website
> - Their wiki
> - Their mailing lists
> - Community involvement
> 
> We need:
> 
> - A clean/simple website directing people to various RDFa resources -
>   like rdfa.info - but cleaner and less generic.
> - A modern, skinnable, extensible wiki (such as MediaWiki)
> - An RDFa wiki at an easy to remember URI: http://rdfa.info/wiki
> - Mailing list for: discussion about using RDFa
> 
> The problem with documents is that we assume an order of teaching that
> does not gel with everyone. I'm sure Ben, Mark and I have very
> different
> ideas of what the Primer document should be and that is an indicator
> that there is a) too much information that we want to put in the Primer
> and b) there are numerous ways, all valid, of teaching RDFa to
> beginners.
> 
> Rather than bet on one horse to do this - we should be entering
> multiple
> horses in the race. We should have a wiki that contains simple to
> complex examples for every vocabulary that we're aware of and use that,
> along with the Primer and Syntax document to teach RDFa to web
> developers. We should start building the infrastructure to support an
> RDFa community once we get through CR - we're not going to be able to
> do
> this by ourselves. We need a community.
> 
> I'll volunteer to setup the mailing lists (mailman) and wiki
> (MediaWiki)
> if nobody else has time to do that. Ben had mentioned some time ago
> that
> it would be nice to keep this stuff at W3C - do we have the capability
> of running MediaWiki or Mailman on W3C servers?
> 
> -- manu
> 
> --
> Manu Sporny
> President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: RDFa Basics (video)
> http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/01/07/rdfa-basics

Received on Sunday, 9 March 2008 10:05:56 UTC