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

Kjetil,

just to comment a bit your comment on this FOAF stuff... But do not
misunderstand me, if we have better ideas, I am certainly happy to yield!



Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> 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/
> 

My problem is and with *all* due respect to browser vendors:-), I would
like a browser independent solution:-)


> 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. 
> 


This is a longer discussion. Microformats are cool, no doubt about it.
But if you look at my foaf file, it mixes 6-7 different vocabularies,
and that becomes fairly complex with microformats...

Having said that: I do not really regard microformats as being
fundamentally different; as you say, with GRDDL the difference becomes
less significant. And, probably, the application we define should be
able to read in microformat via GRDDL! If we are able to merge these,
that *is* a good argument indeed!

>[snip]
> 
> 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. 
> 

That should be finished pretty soon, actually.

Ivan

> Cheers,
> 
> Kjetil

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eivan/AboutMe/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf