Re: Semantic Suggestions please ...

Hi Neil,

Over on the RDFa list you berate the group for not eating their own
dogfood, saying we should be providing something 'more' than just a
wiki and a list.

:)

But the main point of RDFa was actually to enhance the kind of pages
you are talking about.

Adding RDFa to your pages gives two benefits. The first is that other
people can then consume your data, if they have an RDFa parser. It's
just the same as consuming an RSS feed from your server, except the
data is RDF.

(Of course you could publish your data as RDF/XML to get the same
effect, but then you would two sets of pages, one for RDF and one for
HTML.)

The other benefit of publishing RDFa in your pages is that you can
enhance the end-user experience. Take a look at this example, which
publishes a page with some RDFa in it, and then uses a JS library to
post-process that RDFa to both geo-code any addresses, as well as add
maps:

  <http://webbackplane.com/node/63>

That's just one example of what can be done with the embedded data --
it could just as easily be used to derive share prices for your
companies, thumbnails for your people and products...and so on. The
key thing though is that the same data is being used both by other
servers and the client-side JS.

We're using exactly these techniques for a project for the UK
government at the moment, and since this is exactly what RDFa was
invented for, I have no doubt that the same techniques would enhance
your site, too.

Regards,

Mark

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Neil McNaughton <neil@oilit.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Semantic Websters
>
> Our website Oil IT Journal www.oilit.com has about a million words of
> reporting on oil and gas IT. It is moderately well organized stuff, but
> there are a lot of 'unstructured' items (such as company names, people and
> products) that I imagine could usefully be tagged somehow for discovery and
> reuse. I was wondering if this could be achieved by something semantic?
>
> In the run in to the first Semantic Technology for Energy - Oil and Gas
> (http://www.w3.org/2008/07/ogws-cfp) I would like your suggestions on the
> above in order to see if there is a small (but hopefully killer)
> contribution that we could make to advance this technology.
>
> Regards
>
> Neil McNaughton
>
> Editor, Oil IT Journal (www.oilit.com)
>
> Technology Watch Service
> The Data Room
> www.oilit.com
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 12:25:04 UTC