Twitter Annotations API

Twitter is going to launch an annotations API soon (#twannotations), it
looks like this:

http://mehack.com/extremely-preliminary-look-at-twitters-annota

Some of you might be saying "Hey, that looks a great deal like RDF/RDFa"
and you would be right. They even say that it is RDF inspired, but then
say why RDF doesn't fit their use case (without realizing that RDF is
just a data model and doesn't have anything to do with timestamps or
OAuth). I've sent a quick ping out to the Twitter API development team
about this, but here's how it might work.

This is what they have right now:

[{"tv episode"} => {"episode" => "The Vampires of Venice",
                    "series" => "Dr. Who",
                    "air date" => "8 May 2010"}}]

but why not this:

[{"twitter:tv-episode"} => {"dcterms:title" => "The Vampires of Venice",
                           "twitter:tv-series" => "Dr. Who",
                           "twitter:air-date" => "20100508"}}]

It looks like this as triples:

_:twitter-bnode0
   <http://purl.org/dc/terms/title>
      "The Vampires of Venice" ;
   <http://twitter.com/vocab#tv-series>
      "Dr. Who" ;
   <http://twitter.com/vocab#air-date>
      "20100508" .

The assumption is that Twitter would pre-declare a number of
vocabularies one could use in their Twitter API. dcterms and twitter are
assumed above, but there's no reason Twitter couldn't pre-declare even
more vocabularies that people could use for tweets.

This doesn't actually require them to change their Twannotations
system... it just requires the developer community to organize around
pre-declared vocabularies. Serializing Twannotations to HTML+RDFa is
just a matter of expanding the vocabularies into full URIs.

It would involve very minimal effort on Twitter's side - all they would
have to do would be to publish a document that states the vocabularies
that Twitter supports. It could even be an RDFa Profile. Twitter (and
anybody that publishes Twitter data) could then publish HTML+RDFa to
express the data in their pages. They already use XHTML Strict... the
jump to XHTML+RDFa would be very easy.

It's so close, seems like there is a big opportunity for both Twitter
and the RDFa Community here... what do all of you think?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarming Goes Open Source
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/02/01/bitmunk-payswarming/

Received on Sunday, 9 May 2010 13:47:00 UTC