Re: ODF and semantic web

Hi Bruce,

You wrote:
> > It will be interesting to see if the two standards organisations can
> > rise to the challenge.
>
> It would have been even more "interesting" if the W3C in general...

I certainly agree with you there, but I'm only an invited expert at
the W3C--you'd have to talk to coordinators and group chairs about
that one. :)


> ... and you
> in particular had shown some interest in this work 18 months ago (when
> the ODF Metadata Subcommittee was first created). I've regularly been
> posting notes about this work here, without apparent interest.

That's fair enough.

However, although I do read as many lists as I can--because I'm
involved in a lot of different W3C specifications--I only actually
subscribed to the 'semantic web' list a week or so ago, so I'm afraid
I have no idea that these discussions were going on. I don't know if
other people on the taskforce did, and if so, it is very unfortunate
that it wasn't raised in our telecons.


> Elias
> says he did similar with the RDFa group.

Yes, I saw that in Elias' other email; I can't find any reference to
this in any of the taskforce minutes though. I would have expected to
see some direct questions on issues like namespaced attributes--which
I can see appears in the minutes of your discussion even last year--or
requests for reviews of the ideas.

Also, I've searched through my email archives and I can't see any
email that asks me directly for my input. :( It would be quite
annoying if it turns out that some email has gone astray.


> So I'm a little disappointed in your suggestion that we've gone wrong
> here, and that the complaint comes AFTER we've done all the work.

Yes...definitely. I absolutely understand that. Although maybe we
should console ourselves by saying 'better this year, than next'. ;)


> Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out among our group a suggestion of
> how we might put our head's together. I think adopting RDFa as is would
> be a non-starter ATM for the reasons Elias and I mentioned. But my sense
> is we could look to align the attribute names (are they now stable on
> your end??) and you might consider creating a namespaced set of
> attributes for inclusion in XML languages that need that (like ODF).
> That way we could at least at some point declare the ODF in-line
> metadata attributes a proper subset of RDFa.

That sounds like a good way to proceed. The question of having
namespaced attributes is something that myself, Shane and Steven have
done a lot in other specs we've worked on; XML Events and @role, for
example, have a feature that allows the attributes to be imported into
other, non-XHTML, languages, and I _think_ that would meet your needs.
(Although I don't want to be too presumptuous, here.)

As to being a subset, I think it would be fantastic. Certainly, in
terms of a generic parser it would make no difference at all if, for
example, the subject, predicate and object always appeared on the same
element, or if there were certain attributes that simply never
appeared.

Regards,

Mark

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 16:01:14 UTC