Re: Twitter Annotations API

On 05/10/2010 10:37 PM, Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Yes...but the point I was trying to stress before is that the point
> they are making is that RDF is difficult to do in JSON. Whether they
> have criticisms of RDF per se is secondary.
> 
> So unless we're prepared to tackle that, there's not much we can offer.

There's another way... more below...

> (Sorry to be blunt amidst all the excitement...but it's *not* an RDFa issue.)

Ah, but it is very closely related to what we're doing... and with
minimal effort, we can transform it into an RDFa issue.

I don't think that it is a stretch to say that we would all be delighted
if Twitter started publishing all of their pages in XHTML+RDFa. They're
already publishing in XHTML.

The data that they're publishing in Twannotations (I've tried to use
that phrase for the past two days and it still sounds awkward), is
effectively RDF/EAV/Triples.

The goal isn't to get them to buy into a new JSON encoding of RDF... I
doubt that approach would work. The goal is to try to get them to
express their data in a way that is easily transformed into XHTML+RDFa
while simultaneously not creating a great deal of work for them. The
only thing that is required of them is the adoption of CURIEs for
properties and some very minor code on their front-end to transform the
CURIEs to XHTML+RDFa.

The key isn't to try to get them to see the world according to our
eyes... it's to establish a known, deterministic transformation
mechanism to turn Twannotations into XHTML+RDFa. This would enable:

* Twitter to publish XHTML+RDFa, and therefore real-time semantics, for
  any user's timeline.
* Anybody that uses Twitter to transform Twannotations into (X)HTML+RDFa
  using the same mechanism.

All Twitter needs to state is:

1. The prefix mappings that developers can use in property values.
2. The algorithm for mapping Twannotations to HTML+RDFa.

Both #1 and #2 are trivial to specify and they don't require Twitter to
change /anything/ about their software platform (other than state that
CURIEs will be interpreted in a certain way).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.2.2 - Good Relations and Ditching Apache+PHP
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/05/06/bitmunk-3-2-2/2/

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 03:12:38 UTC