Re: Discobits: an ontology for describing the structure of documents

On 7/4/07, Reto Bachmann-Gmür <reto@gmuer.ch> wrote:

> The discobits editor allows creating structured content described using
> the discobits ontology. It is an ajax application that runs in firefox
> and uses mozile to allow wysiwyg editing and tabulator libraries to
> parse the RDF retrieved from the server.
>
> see: http://discobits.org/editor/
>
> I'm looking forward to any comment.

I've been thinking about what a really next-generation semantic editor
that exploited RDF would look like, having spent the past 18 months
working on figuring this out at the document format level WRT to
OpenDocument.

This is a difficult issue. The problem I see with the editor now is
it's not at all clear what value the RDF really adds here. The
document editing is almost all based on presentational styling, rather
than semantic CSS classes and such, which is a point where you can
begin to knit together standard editing interfaces with the more
powerful semantics of RDF.

What if instead we thought about documents as a series of objects with
properties? You don't add some text, highlight it, and give a "heading
1" style or bold, but rather you insert a section. That section has a
title property, as well as any number of additional (RDF encoded)
properties.

I blogged about this awhile back:

<http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/09/16/semantic-documents>

That said, one of my colleagues on the ODF metadata SC was looking for
an ontology to describe structured documents, so I'll be sure to
forward your note to him.

Bruce

Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2007 22:42:47 UTC