Re: Twitter Annotations API

Great idea! Low cost high benefit. 

"Manu Sporny" <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> 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 Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
>President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
>blog: PaySwarming Goes Open Source
>http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/02/01/bitmunk-payswarming/

-- 
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