Re: RDFa Vocabularies

On 2010-1-13 11:54 , Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Hi Ivan,
> 
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>> That is actually a good point... But it is also a matter of how the RDF
>> vocabulary is used. Ie, you are right that having an RDF statement of
>> the sort
>>
>> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> rdfa:term "name"
>>
>> is not a good idea. But having something like
>>
>> [
>>   a rdfa:Term ;
>>   rdfa:uri "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name" ;
>>   rdfa:term "name"
>> ]
>>
>> would be o.k...
> 
> One way to come at this is to ask whether you might do anything with
> these triples.
> 
> For example, might we reason across tokens, so that the URI we map on
> Thursday might be different to the one we use on Sunday?
> 
> I wouldn't rule this out, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a
> situation where it would be better to change the token mapping than it
> would to actually change the underlying data ("on Thursday I work at
> the office; on Sunday I work at home").
> 
> Given this, I don't see much point in going out of our way to create
> tokens in RDF. Just as N3 uses @prefix and RDF/XML uses @xmlns,
> there's nothing necessarily wrong with describing data that is used
> for encoding triples with a language that is not itself used for
> encoding triples.
> 
> Unless you want to reason over the prefix mappings I would suggest
> that all we need are name-value pairs.
>

This is all true. Ie, from the point of view of the goal of the whole
story using RDF or not is not really relevant. I guess (well, I cannot
speak in the name Manu) that the reason may simply be that this is a
data structure that we already have, why inventing another one (simple
that may be). But I am not particularly attached to RDF for this.

> 
>> I regard the Json encoding as a somewhat issue.
> 

Sorry, the line should have said "I regard the Json encoding as a
somewhat different issue". Crucial word missing:-(

> I would argue that the JSON encoding of RDF is crucial to the next
> phase of the semantic web (just as allowing RDF to be transported via
> HTML was crucial for the current phase), but that's a discussion for
> another day.

Absolutely: this is a discussion for another day:-) That is what I
wanted to say...

> 
> The question here is narrower, and concerns whether we can enable a
> broad deployment of token-mapping, across diverse systems; I would
> suggest that we can only do that if JSON is part of the mix.
> 

I am not a huge fan of JSon, probably because I use python where of
course there are json converters but it remains a different syntax to
python structures altogether. But, at the end of the day, I do not care
too much. Using RDFa for that purpose has some advantages, though, ie,
that one can provide a human readable format for the terms being used.
That may be very beneficial for, say, foaf or dc...

Ivan


> Regards,
> 
> Mark
> 
> --
> Mark Birbeck, webBackplane
> 
> mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com
> 
> http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
> 
> webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
> 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
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-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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