- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:57:29 -0400
- To: RDFa Community <public-rdfa@w3.org>
- CC: Liz Turner <liz@iconomical.com>, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>, Libby Miller <libby@nicecupoftea.org>, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
This is an e-mail that was discussed a bit off-line. It's from Doug Schepers, an all-around great guy that I had the pleasure of meeting at this years Web Directions North conference in Denver, CO and the main guy behind SVG and the WebAPI groups @ W3C. We brainstormed a bit about RDFa advocacy and what we might be able to accomplish on a very limited budget and a nascent community. Here's his first e-mail to kick-start the conversation... please share your thoughts as you have them. Doug Schepers wrote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi, Folks- Please allow me to cross-pollinate... Dramatis Personae: * Liz Turner, graphic artiste with a flair for the systematic * Libby Miller, SemWeb goddess * Dan Brickley, Semantic Plumber and Carpenter * Manu Sporny, RDFa/Microformats evangelist * your humble narrator, an SVG monomaniac and tender of fragile technologies at W3C Okay, most of you already know all this, but to put us on the same page... I've been talking with Liz Turner, who made an awesome RDF shirt a few years ago, with the same design as this postcard: http://liz.xtdnet.nl/swad/ This design was commissioned by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller as part of SWAD: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/final_report/ I was lucky enough to get one of these shirts, but now there are no more left. I think that these cool t-shirts are a great way to promote SemWeb stuff, and I'd like to see another print run. I suggested to Liz that we look into making a version with RDFa replacing RDF. Liz has already chimed in with a lot of information about how we would need to do this, what tshirt shops we could go through, etc. that will prove very valuable, if we decide to go ahead. Libby and Dan are also interested in this. Meanwhile, I've been talking a bit with Manu Sporny about ways to use RDFa in SVG. He and I are on the same page about making sure that RDFa is simple to use, simple to understand, and solves real problems, or it will never win adoption. He's been doing outreach along those lines: http://rdfa.info/wiki/Introduction I'm peripherally into SemWeb stuff as a hobby, so I am not on any timeline here. But if you all are interested in making a new tshirt line to promote RDFa/SemWeb, then we could have a fun time. We'd need to gauge interest in how many shirts we'd want, how we are going to spread them, etc. In general, I'm interested in helping to promote SemWeb, and this is just one of the things we could do. I took Liz's original graphics and rebuilt that same diagram, cleaning up the code and adding some interactivity (Opera and Safari only for some of the features... mouse and click around): http://www.schepers.cc/semweb/rdf-diagram.svg For projects along this line, I was thinking of 2 different ideas: 1) hosting the mini-app above at some stable URL related to SemWeb promotion, with that URL included on the tshirt; that could help promote the topic by leading people to the site, where they could play with the gizmo and then click through to learn more about RDF/a and other semweb tech; 2) more ambitiously, a little Webapp that would use similar graphics to let people compose RDF/RDFa markup by dragging and dropping icons, attaching values to them, and connecting them together... and at the end, it would output the RDF/a code (text) so they could use it on their site. It would be a bit like a graphical, snazzier FOAF-a-matic, with scope beyond FOAF: http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html If you are interested in following up with the tshirt or SemWeb promotion in general, or know of anyone who I should have copied on this, dive in. Best Regards- -Doug Schepers W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
Received on Saturday, 14 March 2009 02:58:13 UTC