Re: Twitter Annotations API

Manu Sporny wrote:
> Twitter is going to launch an annotations API soon (#twannotations), it
> looks like this:
>
> http://mehack.com/extremely-preliminary-look-at-twitters-annota
>
> Some of you might be saying "Hey, that looks a great deal like RDF/RDFa"
> and you would be right. They even say that it is RDF inspired, but then
> say why RDF doesn't fit their use case (without realizing that RDF is
> just a data model and doesn't have anything to do with timestamps or
> OAuth). I've sent a quick ping out to the Twitter API development team
> about this, but here's how it might work.
>
> This is what they have right now:
>
> [{"tv episode"} => {"episode" => "The Vampires of Venice",
>                     "series" => "Dr. Who",
>                     "air date" => "8 May 2010"}}]
>
> but why not this:
>
> [{"twitter:tv-episode"} => {"dcterms:title" => "The Vampires of Venice",
>                            "twitter:tv-series" => "Dr. Who",
>                            "twitter:air-date" => "20100508"}}]
>
> It looks like this as triples:
>
> _:twitter-bnode0
>    <http://purl.org/dc/terms/title>
>       "The Vampires of Venice" ;
>    <http://twitter.com/vocab#tv-series>
>       "Dr. Who" ;
>    <http://twitter.com/vocab#air-date>
>       "20100508" .
>
> The assumption is that Twitter would pre-declare a number of
> vocabularies one could use in their Twitter API. dcterms and twitter are
> assumed above, but there's no reason Twitter couldn't pre-declare even
> more vocabularies that people could use for tweets.
>
> This doesn't actually require them to change their Twannotations
> system... it just requires the developer community to organize around
> pre-declared vocabularies. Serializing Twannotations to HTML+RDFa is
> just a matter of expanding the vocabularies into full URIs.
>
> It would involve very minimal effort on Twitter's side - all they would
> have to do would be to publish a document that states the vocabularies
> that Twitter supports. It could even be an RDFa Profile. Twitter (and
> anybody that publishes Twitter data) could then publish HTML+RDFa to
> express the data in their pages. They already use XHTML Strict... the
> jump to XHTML+RDFa would be very easy.
>
> It's so close, seems like there is a big opportunity for both Twitter
> and the RDFa Community here... what do all of you think?
>
> -- manu
>
>   
Manu,

Cut long story short, we simply execute the same set of activities that 
have worked well re. opengraph:

1. Join the conversation
2. Get hold of the schema (or make one)
3. Embrace and Extend (gently).

Bingo!

More structured data on the burgeoning Web of Linked Data.

Don't allow "R-D-F" to distract (responses are predictable), just help 
them understand the 3-tuple as the atom for structured data creation and 
dissemination. At the end of the day structured data is easily 
transformable data, so the worst outcome is data that is easily 
transformed to RDF family of formats + EAV++ (i.e. use of 
de-referencable Identifiers for Names across the Entity, Attribute, and 
Value slots).


We're nearly there !


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen       
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Sunday, 9 May 2010 15:33:45 UTC