Re: call to arms

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