The current technical proposals to answer to the schema.org related issues on RDFa 1.1

Guys,

The RDFWA has been fairly active the past few weeks. The goal is to find a technical solution to all the various issues that were raised through the schema.org discussion. We think we have a technical design now, but feedback on this, and on the possible consequences, are important at this point.

I guess the technical issues fall into separate categories.

1. RDFa Lite. As you may already know, there is now an editor's draft for RDFa 1.1 Lite[1]. There has been some minor comments since we published that, but nothing substantial (only editorial). I would expect to publish this, formally as a First Public Working Draft, together with all the other draft publication when we are all in line. It would then follow its course as a Last Call, CR, etc.

2. Issues around @property vs. @rel. We separated this issue because the group believes this should _not_ be an RDFa Lite feature but, rather, a functionality on the RDFa 1.1 level overall. This ensures an upward compatibility, ie, that an HTML content using RDFa Lite would also produce the same triples if considered RDFa 'Full'; this level of compatibility is, imho, essential.

We had a long discussion on the exact shape of the @rel/@property issue, which has now reached a somewhat more stable state documented on the Wiki[2]. I know it is a fairly technical text but hopefully it is clear to you nevertheless. There are, actually, two open issues on somewhat corner cases, also documented on the wiki[3]. The WG still has to decide on those, and your input would be important.

B.t.w., the scheme is implementable. Both Gregg and I have a running implementation of [2] on our respective machines (Gregg's may be on line, I am not sure), meaning that the change on the processing rules[4] seem to be correct...

3. There are some minor issues on HTML5 specific elements and attributes that are not mentioned in RDFa Lite or on [2]; these are really non-controversial, we just did not really formally decide on them. These are to include the @data attribute as a possible target alongside @href and @src; to accept the @value attribute for the @data element (as a literal); and, if <time> is indeed re-introduced into HTML5, then add an automatic xsd:date to the corresponding attribute there. I wish these were the only issues to handle for RDFa 1.1:-)

All: we would really need your feedbacks here to be able to conclude all this soonish...

Thanks

P.S.

As a fully and absolutely and completely non-serious comparison, I looked at my foaf file with respect of RDFa 1.0 and RDFa 1.1. See about that in[5] if you are interested


[1] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/sources/rdfa-lite/Overview-src.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/wiki/PropertyAndTypeof
[3] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/wiki/PropertyAndTypeof#Issues_to_Discuss
[4] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/wiki/PropertyAndTypeof#Processing
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa-wg/2011Nov/0024.html



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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf