Re: Now it's RDF vs Microformats

On 22.02.2007 11:20:13, Paul Walsh, Segala wrote:
>Thought some of you might like to comment on this [1]. I'm going to write a
>post addressing the same topic but to counter Sam's misunderstanding and his
>failure to understand that Microformats is (part of) the Semantic Web -
great!

>addressing approximately 1% (+- 1% ;)) of the Semantic Web potential and
>using an extremely good hacked method that's not based on standards.
Try to avoid talking about "potential" uses, it's a "shake head and 
laughter" trigger in MF circles. And I'd also suggest not to talk
about the standards thing. MFs are based on semantic HTML principles
and from a microformateer's POV no standard justifies any effort needed
above that. The deployment so far may support that argument. I know I'm
repeating myself, but I'd focus on the non-syntax features of RDF,
things like storage, querying, and merging, which are not covered by
microformats technology.

One quote which is easy to dismiss is
[[
“breaking things down into smaller units, decentralisation and 
modular design are all approaches to simplicity” which is the goal of
microformats.
]]
Nothing has smaller units than RDF, nothing is more decentralized 
than RDF, nothing is more modular than RDF. I've just written a 
MF-to-RDF converter, the implicit interconnections between the 
different MFs are rather complex for both publishers and consumers.
They also make up at least 50% of the questions on the MF IRC 
channel (à la "what are the exact semantics of a rel-tag in an 
hreview in an hentry"). There is some sort of transitivity in MFs
that's more complicated than the triple model's trivial scope
principle.


>Ok now that I've said it without thinking properly (which can be a good
>thing), what do you think about my use of the word hacked (I won't quote
>you). 
It might be considered disrespectful, and could add to the wrong 
"versus" perception. I'd not use it unless you can get it across as
a positive thing. There also went a lot of thinking into MFs, even
if that isn't always obvious from the markup ;)

>I met David Recordon [2] last night and talked about OpenID and how to get
>FOAF into the mix. This is something I've chatted (briefly) about with
>Philip Hallam-Baker and Dan Brickley, who have the same view. I'd like to
>push this conversation if anyone here is interested in helping to make it a
>reality and not just a conversation.
Cool. Ian Davis just brought this up on the foaf ml, too. I've talked to
David as well, they agreed to put an RDF Schema on their server which
should get us most of the way to connect people to their OpenIDs.


Cheers, and a successful talk!
Ben


>I'll use my talk tonight [3] as an opportunity to spell out the problems
>with the comparison above.
>
>[1]
>http://www.vecosys.com/2007/02/22/the-semantic-web-complexity-versus-simplic
>ity/
>[2] http://daveman692.livejournal.com/
>[3] http://tinyurl.com/2sbqne 
>
>Cheers
>Paul
>
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Received on Thursday, 22 February 2007 12:52:23 UTC