Re: RDFa Questions Answered (part 1/N)

Manu,

As always, thanks for continuing this discussion and very productively
summarizing a number of important points. I think this is very helpful.

There is one small part with which I disagree that I'd like to highlight.

> Where? Can anyone on here just point me to a page that has all of this
> information in an easy-to-digest form? I don't have time to troll
> through mailing lists discussing esoteric knowledge representation issues.

[... and more in the same vein ...]

There are a number of talks on RDFa, with slides and videos. Here are
two that I found in < 1 minute:

http://rdfa.info/talks-about-rdfa/
http://labs.creativecommons.org/2008/06/18/ccrel-joining-man-and-machine-presenting-cute-dogs/

But there's a deeper issue here: when did this become purely about
advocacy? Sure, we can always improve the material, and I agree that we
should make an effort here.

That said, this is a technical discussion in a standards group. I expect
folks to spend *some* time reviewing the existing body of work and research.

There are hundreds of conference and journal articles about RDF, many of
them about practical considerations and implementations.  It's not okay
to expect that everything worth considering has already been digested
into a beautiful 10-minute YouTube video (the first few google hits for
HTML5 are certainly involved [1]). In a technical discussion within a
standards group, it's everyone's individual job to learn by reading some
of these technical articles.

Not everything, of course. Ian and other folks on the WG certainly don't
need to become RDF or RDFa experts. But I believe that, in general, the
important players of the HTML5 WG bear some responsibility to learn on
their own the various areas of web research, and that includes the
semantic web and RDFa, especially when RDFa appears in the HTML WG
Charter. That's part of being a standards group editor/leader.

-Ben

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

Received on Monday, 23 February 2009 06:07:45 UTC