Re: Public SWEO Challenge? (was Re: Running code)

On Thursday 21 December 2006 09:10, Ivan Herman wrote:
> The goal is to create a foaf based personal address book.

Well, I think it illustrates another point, that there is some urgency 
because there are other technologies that does many of the cool things 
that we want to do, but has much more traction among developers. In 
this case, microformats do what you want, I think:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator/

I do not think that microformats is in conflict with the Semantic Web, 
and we have GRDDL. I think microformats have many bad things about it, 
like namespace problems, and it won't be as easy to parse as its 
proponents claim, but I think that it may lead developers to reject RDF 
as "too complex", as they do not see that RDF provides significant 
benefits over microformats. If RDF only does what microformats allready 
do, there is no reason to support RDF, is it?

Microformats doesn't provide a consistent data model for all kinds of 
data, and it doesn't have the "reliably interlinked" nature of a graph 
model. Microformats will require an ad-hoc hack for most formats.

I think that to appeal to this community, we can use GRDDL to transform 
microformats to an RDF model internally, so that e.g. a Javascript can 
access the microformat as a consistent RDF data structure, with an API, 
and possibly SPARQL. That would provide a strong incentive for using 
RDF even when the server provides a microformat. 

As Aaron Swartz remarked, it is very urgent, he feels it may allready be 
too late to get this community involved. On one hand, I see all the 
cool things being done, it was very interesting reviewing papers for 
the ISWC, and I see the great interest in the enterprise. On the other 
hand, I also see the urgency of getting the average developer involved. 
It may be that the enterprise is enough to get the Semantic Web to lift 
off, but I would not count on it, and I think that we must learn and 
adapt to what microformats are being used for. 

Now, I didn't intend to shoot down the idea, as it is one of the cooler 
things, definitely! But I'm not sure it will make a compelling 
argument, and also, we need the vCard-in-RDF finished urgently to do 
it. 

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Semantic Web Specialist
Opera Software ASA

Received on Thursday, 21 December 2006 12:20:02 UTC