Facebook - RDFa in Open Graph Protocol

So this just got a high-profile launch at Facebook's F8 conference a
couple hours ago -

http://opengraphprotocol.org/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph

They're using RDFa, putting structured data into Web sites to sit
alongside a Facebook "Likes" button, so that the topic of the page
(movie, restaurant, book, whatever...) can be understood by apps
downstream dealing with the social data. The RDFa is pretty basic, and
I warned David that there's a good chance they'll be jumped upon by
100s of well-meaning semweb advocates arguing that they should be
using more existing vocabs, different syntax structures, etc etc. I'd
urge you all to go gently on that front for now, and focus instead
more on how we can improve RDFa tooling and specs than on lobbying for
improvements.

>From what I've seen RDFa's graph data model is a good fit for what
they're trying to express (i.e. things and properties), the use of
RDFa in the HTML header makes sense given the desire for fairly
regular data that doesn't get trashed with every site redesign, and
the current use of <meta> isn't quite ideal since properties have an
indirect meaning along the lines of "the director (of the film this
page is about)", "the cuisine (of the bar this page is about)" etc.
but I think is a fine start. This modelling might be quirky but it's
their choice, and perhaps a step towards something more expressively
graphy. We'll see. Looking to the future I hope we can see some of the
deployment pragmatics from this work feed into the RDFa 1.1 design...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 21 April 2010 19:33:42 UTC