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

As mostly, recently ;-), I agree with Kingsley - I did not want to say 
that proper usage of http is bad or obsolete. But it turned out 
unfeasible for broad adoption my owners of small Web sites.

For huge data sources and for vocabularies, the current recipes are 
fine. But I want every single business in the world to use GoodRelations 
for publishing at least their opening hours - 19 Million companies in 
Europe alone. I cannot explain to every single one of them how to 
configure their server.

Another thing that might have gone lost in the discussion: Even though 
we knew the recipes, helping the site owners was difficult, because we 
experienced hundreds of different environments - preexisting .htaccess, 
MS IIS, hoster-specific scenarios, etc. So the problem is really that 
such a low-level technique is not feasible if you face so much diversity 
as far as the target system is concerned.

Maybe some day a certain LOD/SW package will be installed by default on 
most servers. But we cannot wait till then.

BTW: We did not even require the full beauty of LOD best practices. We 
simply want them to do as described here:

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Recipe_8

Best
Martin

Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
>>> That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any 
>>> XHTML
>>> document.
>>>
>>> Any opinions?
>>>     
>>
>> Great, why bother with any other solution.
>> even talking about any other solution is extraordinarely bad for the
>> public perception of the semantic web community.
>>
>> Giovanni
>>
>>
>>   
> Giovanni,
>
> We don't need mutual exclusivity re. Linked Data Deployment.
>
> There's nothing wrong with an array of options that cover a broad 
> range of Linked Data deployment circumstances.
>
> HTTP is the essence of the Web (what makes it what it is), and Content 
> Negotiation is intrinsic to HTTP.
>
> Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, really.
>
>

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
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