RE: Twitter Annotations API

Seems like a good idea Manu - not clear why RDF/RDFa can't fit their use
case.

It's opportunities like this that can speed up adoption. Also the
semantics of the option they have now look quite loose compared to the
example you outline...

Cheers,

                                           
John O'Donovan
Chief Technical Architect

BBC Future Media & Technology (Journalism)
BC3 C1, Broadcast Centre, 201 Wood Lane, London

http://news.bbc.co.uk/
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-rdfa-wg-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-rdfa-wg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Manu Sporny
Sent: 09 May 2010 14:46
To: RDFa Community
Subject: Twitter Annotations API

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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Received on Monday, 10 May 2010 01:51:07 UTC