- From: Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:38:58 +0100
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
In message <q2reb19f3361004180617g1dbfdd67i358df9881b9e9b98@mail.gmail.com>, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> writes > >When I think about linked information these days, I see three major flavours: > >* information in classic document form (analog stuff made of bits; >human-oriented prose, video, imagery) >* information in source-attributed RDF claims (aka Linked Data, quads, etc) >* information in people's heads I suggest that there is an important breakdown within the "classic document form" flavour, into machine-processible (e.g. XHTML, application-specific XML) and machine-opaque (HTML, images, video). >For me, the RDFWeb/FOAF story I think has always been about the 3-way >relationship between these different equally important ways of >learning about the world. Linked people *and* linked information. > >You can think of lots of aspects of SemWeb as positioned as edges of >this simple triangle where the nodes are the categories above. RDF >syntaxes, GRDDL for microformats, RDFa, Adobe XMP, ebook metadata, >Dublin Core etc are often links between classic document forms and RDF >quads. Sometimes RDF quads are more to summarise what the document >says about the world; other times they are to help find it. Similarly, >provenance, authorship and other people-describing RDF, also >people-describing non-RDF information, can all help us to find whose >*head* might have the right information. A YouTube video can capture >something of a person's subjective knowledge of the world and put it >out there in document form for others to find; tags and RDF stuff can >help others find that video and either learn directly or get in touch. >SemWeb people (all of us) can easily focus only on one of these forms >of information, at the expense not only of the other two, but their >rich interconnections. Machine-unfriendly video, images, audio or .xls >files can still be very useful, and the 'RDF as metadata about files' >use case is one we too easily neglect. All true and useful, but once your machine lookup has resolved to a "document form", it can do further processing on a processible resource, e.g. to check its relevance, or extract a summary from it to incorporate within a larger response. All it can do with an opaque source is lob it back to the human reader "as found", for them to make of what they will. Richard -- Richard Light
Received on Monday, 19 April 2010 09:41:26 UTC