Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

2009/7/2 Linde, A.E. <ael13@leicester.ac.uk>:

> Could someone summarise this thread in a single (unbiased?) post, please?

I'll try to answer the questions, even though I've only skimmed the thread...

> a) what is/are the blocks on LOD via RDF

The vast majority of publication tools and supporting services are
geared towards publishing HTML. While a key piece of Web architecture
is the the ability to publish multiple representations of a given
resource (e.g. both HTML and RDF/XML format documents with a single
URI through content negotiation), the mechanisms needed to do this are
often unavailable from regular hosting services. Similarly the
redirect handling needed to provide a description of a resource that
cannot appear directly on the Web - things, people etc - is also not
possible.
Typically these would be done through using .htaccess files on Apache.

> b) how does RDFa help and what are its own failings;

RDFa allows the RDF to be published in a HTML document, so content
negotiation isn't needed. You get two representations in one.

Again tool support is a problem, although with RDFa being a new spec
the situation is bound to improve.

GRDDL may also be a useful alternative if the source data is available
in an XML format.

> c) what are the recipes for making data discoverable, linkable and usable

there are recipes at:
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
though perhaps a cheat sheet would be a good idea?

 > if i) one has full access to a server;

this is pretty well documented, e.g. as above

> ii) one has only user directory acccess to a server;

while this may often be the same as i) generally I'd suggest it's a
case-by-case thing, depending on the web server configuration

iii) one does not know or care what a server is.

Depending on the nature of the data, it may be possible to use one of
the semweb-enabled document-first publishing tools (a semantic wiki or
CMS). Alternately a relational DB to RDF mapping tool may help.

But best bet right now though would be to have a word with someone
offering linked data publishing services - Talis or OpenLink, may be
others.

I've no doubt missed a lot of points and alternate approaches, but I
these were top of my own mental heap :)

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 14:11:27 UTC