Re: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Manu Sporny wrote:
> 
> We have been gathering a complete list of Use Cases for the HTML5+RDFa 
> discussion here:
> 
> http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-use-cases

Ideally it would be helpful if the descriptions did not actually mention 
RDF or RDFa. For example, looking at the first use case:

| The system uses RDFa to speed up user interaction when editing 
| structured data. Instead of communicating with a remote server, the 
| WSWYIG editor uses a direct manipulation based on RDFa and updates the 
| server with the generated RDF graph only when the interaction finishes.

It's not clear here what makes RDF any more interesting to the solution 
than, say, JSON, or SQL, or XML.

Is the problem "The user interactions when editing structured data using 
technologies like JSON, SQL, or XML are slow"?

The SearchMonkey problem description, while not really phrased as a 
problem, is much closer to the kind of thing I'm looking for in order to 
evaluate the proposals here.

The ccREL use case description doesn't describe the problem. It just 
describes what ccREL is. It would be helpful if the problem was actually 
explained, e.g. "Authors need a way to make sure that their content reuses 
other content only in the manner allowed by that other content".

Again, with the Bitmunk description: what is the problem being solved? Is 
it "users can't buy music online"? Is it "sites that discuss TV shows want 
to be able to have their users buy the TV shows without explicitly picking 
one provider and running the risk of appearing biased by taking a referral 
fee"? Is it "Web browsers don't have a way to determine what is a movie 
name which is necessary for them to show UI to offer to send them to 
iTunes to buy movies"?

With Fuzzbot, what is the problem? Examples of what is "smarter" would be 
good. How would this help an author writing on a Facebook blog or a user 
reading that blog, say?

I'll stop now, but hopefully this helps explain why the current use cases 
aren't really helpful. The idea is not to show that RDF is great, the idea 
is to show what users and authors can't do today, so that we can find the 
best solutions for those users and authors (which may well be RDFa).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 21:11:14 UTC