Fwd: How to deal with an <a> link applied to a person's name

A question from Michael Steidl of the International Press
Telecommunications Council (IPTC)...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:  How to deal with an link applied to a person's name
Date:  Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:23:25 +0200
From:  Michael Steidl (IPTC) <mdirector@iptc.org>
Organization:  IPTC
To:  <public-rdfa-wg-request@w3.org>
CC:  'Manu Sporny' <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>



Hi Manu and all:



We at the IPTC are currently behind making rNews 1.0 specifications and
documentation public and this includes working on use cases. One
specific issue is causing us some headaches:



We have a web page which shows a photo and provides some metadata about
that photo on that page – example:
http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/test1/img-2011-10-11T084203-139.html
(this is part of another IPTC WG’s project)



On that page we have the name of the photographer and the metadata in
the image may provide a URL in a field named “Contact information: web
address” and this web address should be applied as link to the person’s
name  - and we want to mark this up using the rNews schema and RDFa syntax.



This resulted into this HTML:

<p>This picture was taken by <span rel="rnews:creator">

<span typeof="rnews:Person"><a target="_blank"
href="http://www.riecks.com/ <view-source:http://www.riecks.com/>"><span
property="rnews:name">David Riecks</span></a></span>

</span>.....</p>



When we apply this page to the RDF distiller of Kellogg Associates
(http://rdf.kellogg-assoc.com/distiller) we get this result (extract only):

....

<http://www.riecks.com/> rnews:name "David Riecks" .

....

<http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/supportgallery-img/images/img-2011-10-11T084203-139.jpg>
a rnews:ImageObject;

   rnews:creator [ a rnews:Person];

....



We infer from that: if a link is put around a string which is attributed
as the name of a Person the RDF distiller assumes that this <a> tag
provides an identifier for this person by it @href.



Other people of our Semantic Web WG told me that they have the same
experience with other RDF parsers.



But: it is quite common to apply a link pointing to the web site of a
company a person is working for to the name of a person on a web page.
Therefore we assume not being the only one running into this problem.

Our questions are:

-          Are we wrong in applying RDFa this way? – what would be the
right way?

-          Is the distiller wrong in making this assumption?

-          Is there a way by RDFa means to tell the RDF distiller
**not** to make this assumption?



Thanks for any help in resolving this issue.



Michael



*Michael Steidl*

Managing Director of the IPTC [mdirector@iptc.org]

International Press Telecommunications Council
Web: www.iptc.org <http://www.iptc.org/>- on Twitter @IPTC
<http://www.twitter.com/IPTC>

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 17:18:33 UTC