Re: Chat with Ivan on RDFa 1.1 Authoring features

Toby,

On Mar 24, 2010, at 19:14 , Toby Inkster wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 16:47 -0400, Ivan Herman wrote:
>> What I said, to be more precise: if our goal is (and I think it is) to
>> simplify RDFa and bring it closer to HTML(5) authors, then we should
>> keep away from RDFS. We would shoot ourselves in the foot in the sense
>> that it would make RDFa more complex conceptually, something we do not
>> want to do... (sorry Toby:-) 
> 
> As I've said, I'm not suggesting that RDFa includes RDFS/OWL. (I had
> previously suggested this though.)
> 
> My suggestion is that RDFa does not need to contain a profile feature -
> all it needs to do is provide a way of setting a default prefix.
> 

My reaction in my discussion with Manu was that this default prefix is so simple and so obviously useful that we should adopt it. I think I said that it is a no brainer for me. But having this feature does not necessarily mean we do not have profile documents, though, it only means that for many cases we do not need profile documents.

Ivan





> This would enable Google, say, to recommend publishing data like this:
> 
> 	<p vocab="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="Person">
> 	  <a property="name" rel="url" href="/">Toby Inkster</a>
> 	</p>
> 
> i.e. as they currently do, but without prefixes.
> 
> The default prefix (indeed, non-default prefixes too) *may* be
> dereferenced to find an RDF schema, which might result in the consumer
> being able to infer additional triples. But that's a consideration
> orthogonal to RDFa 1.1. (After all, RDFS and OWL reasoning like that can
> already be conducted on existing RDFa 1.0 documents if the consumer
> chooses to do so.)
> 
> No, this suggestion is not as powerful as RDFa profiles, but the use of
> profiles introduces fragility into RDFa documents, and I'm not convinced
> that the use cases suggested so far justify taking the risk with them.
> 
> Whatsmore, I think that my suggestion leaves us room for adding profiles
> in a future version of RDFa without changing the syntax. (You'd just
> tell RDFa parsers to start performing profile processing on the URIs
> given in @vocab.) Jumping straight to profiles doesn't allow us a
> natural path back from them if they turn out to be a mistake.
> 
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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