- From: Martin Hepp (UniBW) <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:44:29 +0200
- To: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- CC: bill.roberts@planet.nl, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web at W3C <semantic-web@w3c.org>
- Message-ID: <4A43A96D.3090207@ebusiness-unibw.org>
Hi all: After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata for their businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1], I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of using .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic Web technology. Just some data: - We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people spend 10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of themselves. - Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 % of them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root directory. - Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe. The effects are - URIs that are not dereferencable, - incorrect media types and and other problems. When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we encountered a variety of configurations and causes that we did not expect. It turned out that helping people just managing this tiny step of publishing Semantic Web data would turn into a full-time job for 1 - 2 administrators. Typical causes of problems are - Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give limited or no access to .htaccess) - Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it begins with a dot - Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes - Many users have access just at a CMS level Bottomline: - For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an Apache server so that it serves RDF content according to current best practices. - For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a prohibitively difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a variety in the technical environments that turns into an engineering challenge what is easy on the textbook-level. As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates "dummy" RDFa code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data without interfering with the presentation layer. That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any XHTML document. Any opinions? Best Martin [1] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/ Danny Ayers wrote: > Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill. > > Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format > you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the > single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the > alternate representations for conneg. > > As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for > RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good choice > for typical Web applications. > > As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly, > though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present. > Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the > surface area of the data. > > But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish data > directly without needing the human element to interpret it. > > I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few years > before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real > benefit for the end user. > > my 2 cents. > > Cheers, > Danny. > > > -- -------------------------------------------------------------- martin hepp e-business & web science research group universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen e-mail: mhepp@computer.org phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217 fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620 www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group) http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal) skype: mfhepp twitter: mfhepp Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data! ======================================================================== Webcast: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/ Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology" http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp Tool for registering your business: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/ Overview article on Semantic Universe: http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe Project page and resources for developers: http://purl.org/goodrelations/ Tutorial materials: Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 16:45:08 UTC