Re: ODF and semantic web

Great to hear there's progress being made on ODF & RDF. Coordination
with the RDFa folks would seem to be a good course of action.

Ok, so I'm prompted to mail by this:

On 15/10/2007, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@formsplayer.com> wrote:

> GRDDL is a necessary hack to allow legacy mark-up to be made
> 'semantic'. But I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that you
> can build a 'semantic web' on such a flaky framework. Which means that
> it's not a good idea to design languages on the basis that 'it doesn't
> matter what I do, because I can always GRDDL it'.

While GRDDL does allow 'legacy' markup to be made 'semantic', this is
a remarkably shallow view. GRDDL allows a mapping to be declared
between an arbitrary XML format and the RDF model. Ok, so the
mechanism spec'd right now is XSLT, but potentially any transformation
system that could be identified with a URI could be used.

Frank Manola put things nicely:
[[
It seems to me that if you have a notation, and a well-defined
transformation from that notation to RDF, then what you've defined is,
whatever else it might be, simply a non-RDF/XML notation for RDF.
After all, what's RDF/XML?  It's an XML notation with a defined
tranformation from that notation to RDF.  There just happens to be a
W3C spec for it.
]]
(sorry, lost original source - probably this list)

One might ask, what's RDFa?

You don't necessarily need GRDDL and/or XSLT to interpret any given
XML dialect as RDF - prose specs are more traditional. The neat thing
GRDDL does bring to the table is that you can interpret XML dialects
you've never seen before.

You could (if you so wished) provide a formal RDF definition for RDFa
using just XSLT and RDF/XML. If you provided the appropriate links,
GRDDL-aware agents could interpret the documents automatically.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 18:03:56 UTC