- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:34:47 +0100
- To: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Cc: Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, Tom Heath <tom.heath@talis.com>, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, bill.roberts@planet.nl, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web at W3C <semantic-web@w3c.org>
Hi Kingsley, > If you are comfortable producing (X)HTML documents, then simply use RDFa and > terms from relevant vocabularies to describe yourself, your needs, your > offerings, and other things, clearly. Once you've done that, simply leave > the Web to do the REST :-) > > Everything else is a technical detail (imho). But that isn't the discussion we're having, IMHO. We're not talking about how you or I might do it -- people comfortable with .htaccess files, server configuration, and so on. My understanding of the discussion that was going on, is that whilst we all want to see the semantic web succeed (even if we all have a different view of what the semantic web is), we're asking how exactly it is that we can achieve it. And for years, the solutions proposed have been somewhat mysterious; RDF/XML, SPARQL end-points, N3, content negotiation, 303s, and so on. You have to ask yourself at some point, do we want the data, or don't we -- do we want people to publish stuff that we 'semwebbers' can use? And if we do want it, then let's help them publish it. I may be biased because I've had my nose pressed up against it for too many years, but I believe that in this regards, RDFa is a game-changer. It's not GRDDL, which says 'publish whatever the hell you like and we'll convert it'. It's not microformats, which says, 'here are a handful of centralised vocabularies, for use on a decentralised web'. And it's not RDF/XML, which requires you to take apart your server and put it back together again. It's HTML. And everyone knows at least one way to publish HTML, don't they? In the years that I've been involved with the RDFa work, the mental model I have always had, is of someone using Blogger or Drupal or something just as simple, to publish RDF. That's now possible with RDFa, and what's even more exciting, Yahoo! and Google will pick it up. I realise I'm sounding like an evangelist (no doubt because I am one). :) But my suggestion would be that we have a window of opportunity here, to create a semantic infrastructure that is indistinguishable from the web itself; the more metadata we can get into HTML-space, the more likely we are to bring about a more 'semantic' web...before anyone notices. ;) Regards, Mark -- Mark Birbeck, webBackplane mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR)
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 22:35:34 UTC