- From: Uldis Bojars <captsolo@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:42:43 +0000
- To: "Xiaoshu Wang" <wangxiao@musc.edu>, semantic-web@w3.org
- Message-ID: <64c81f720611171542v679d8cdcj5942ff00bdbc7227@mail.gmail.com>
On 11/17/06, Xiaoshu Wang <wangxiao@musc.edu> wrote: > > > > My €0.02: Ignore the titles, or take them just as a very broad hint. > > I would take the same approach too. Title is supposed to be a hint for > humans, not machines. In fact, the combination of the "meta" and > "application/xml+rdf", suggests an RDF/XML parser. If you have such a > parser, it should be able to understand any RDF model. Then, why not simply > pointing to one external RDF document. In this document, use some RDF > vocabularies to describe the location of different profiles, something like > > ex:resource title:foaf <uri_1>; > title:sioc <uri_2>; > title:doap <uri_3>. Hints can be useful both for machines and humans. Machines are used by humans after all. And if the document itself is not human-readable, what value its title is it to a human reader? Adding yet another RDF document does not pass the rule that "everything should be as simple as possible [but not simpler]". A collection of "meta" tags do provide links to all the profiles and add some hints. It is hard to prove necessity for an additional RDF document - it would be like using rdfs:Bags (which are almost extinct now) when not needed. Using a number of separate "meta" links with type "application/rdf+xml" as it is now achieves the same purpose. I would say that having hints is good (unless there is something as simple and better). Yet, we can argue about how to best provide links or hints - which is being discussed in this thread now. It would be a mistake to say that this pattern is only now appearing - autodiscovery links are a well established pattern. It has been around long enough for some RDF autodiscovery tools e.g. FOAFer [1] to no longer be working with Firefox 1.5 and for new tools like Semantic Radar [2] and FOAFox [3] to appear. [1] http://crschmidt.net/foaf/foafer.html [2] http://sioc-project.org/firefox/ [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2633 Recommendations for its use (or abuse) are integrated in the documentation of a number ontologies including FOAF [4], ICRA Labelling [5], DOAP and SIOC and are used by various providers of RDF (FOAF, SIOC, DOAP, ICRA, some RSS 1.0) data on the web, such as LiveJournal FOAF export. Alternative methods for pointing to related RDF information like using RDFa [6] may take over in the future, of course. [4] http://rdfweb.org/topic/Autodiscovery | http://iandavis.com/blog/2003/02/foafAutodiscovery [5] http://www.icra.org/systemspecification/#specificLink [6] http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/archives/2006/06/07/seealso-for-sioc-hooked-in-page-via-rdfa/ But because it is very simple and so similar to the widely used RSS autodiscovery (though I do not know if it "abuses" the title or not) it is probably not going away any time soon. My initial thought was that specifying ontology identifiers (like Sean proposes) may be of help to improve this pattern but now I am not so convinced - these links are just hints and free text works well for that - if an application needs to know more it shall retrieve these resources and see for itself. P.S. Yet these hints are helpful for such simple applications like Semantic Radar where RDF parsing may not always be easy to accomplish or where browser security settings may prevent access to resources that are not located on the same host that the user is currently viewing. Uldis [ http://captsolo.net/info/ ]
Received on Friday, 17 November 2006 23:43:02 UTC