Re: generating XHTML code+RDFa dinamically

Andras,

quick answer to your questions:

- yes, XHTML+RDFa is certainly one way of moving forward. Whether you
want to use it or you prefer to keep the RDF content in a separate file
is, ultimately, your choice, and it may depend on the tools you have or
you will have.

- speaking of tools: the upcoming Drupal 7 release will include RDFa
natively; there are also some extra modules you can download that will
help you adding such goodies as a SPARQL endpoint. Unfortunately, I am
not sure when that will be available, you will have to contact the
Drupal community for that. But if you are planning your work, ie, you
are not in a hurry, I would certainly look at this possibility.

I hope this helps

Ivan

Andras Pongo wrote:
> Dear Semantic Web Deployment Working Group!
> 
> I'm an Msc student and I'm planning to prepare a thesis about certain
> aspects of the Semantic Web. I already had some work about the concept
> considering the bottom-up approach. I intended to create a Firefox
> plugin which may annotate some special existing texts on the web but
> challenges, that I'm sure you're aware of seemed to be too much for my
> goals.
> 
> So, for now I decided to turn to the top-bottom approach.
> 
> I thought of a web application similar to Twine or Freebase where people
> could annotate certain topics to eventually create a distributable
> knowledge base with RDF and OWL. The site, if the thing that is being
> annotated happens to be described by one of the ontology (or the users
> already have or create their own ontology), could give hints for the
> annotator about what properties can be annotated of that actual thing.
> So basically a tool that may encourage the web user community to
> generate machine processable annotations by trying to present some kind
> of a user friendly GUI. I know that this is also a big task also, but
> the my current problem is not exacctly this.
> 
> My basic question is more related to RDFa. If I understand correctly a
> new approach is emerging which will integrate the semantics in the page
> (XHTML) source code to handle human and machine 'processable' content
> together, instead of storing annotations in separate files (on which my
> original concept based).
> Could you verify that? Shall I try to create a web application based on
> RDFa, or it is enough (because possibly it is easier), if I implement it
> based on the original RDF concept? If RDFa is truly the future, could
> you then give me some hint there are there any tool available now or in
> the near future, or are there any best-practices about how one can add
> these type of semantics to XHTML dinamically? Not hard coding it into
> the code by a developper, but to insert such code into an XHTML based on
> user annotations. What is your general idea about is? Using a separate
> RDF for the annotation as a buffer, and regenerate the XHTML from it
> when the annotated data is being retrieved?
> 
> Thank you very much in advance!
> /András Pongó

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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