Re: semantics vs. document markup

>>>>> Bob DuCharme <bob@snee.com> writes:

[…]

 > <application>Foo</application> in a DocBook document is something
 > that they'll understand.  (I don't think they'll understand
 > <docbook:application>Foo</docbook:application>, because the last I
 > checked there was no namespace declared for DocBook.  I saw that you
 > didn't include a declaration for the DocBook: prefix in your
 > example.)

 DocBook uses a namespace since 5.0 (published in 2009):

--cut: http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch01.html --
    All DocBook V5.0 elements are in the namespace
    http://docbook.org/ns/docbook.
--cut: http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch01.html --

 (Though I should've mentioned the version explicitly.)

 Curiously, [2] uses this namespace.

[2] http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/42543/1954?supportItem=3

 Also, [1] mentions the DocBook DTD, which is no longer normative
 as of 5.0, as the latter relies on a RELAX NG grammar instead:

--cut: http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch01.html --
    In V5.0, DocBook has been rewritten as a native RELAX NG grammar
    (“An introduction to the RELAX NG schema language” [RNG-Intro] is an
    excellent introduction to the grammar).
--cut: http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch01.html --

 FWIW, it's my opinion that it was the aggregation of both the
 markup and grammar facilities within a single specification that
 has contributed to the de facto demise of SGML.

[1] http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/42543/1954

 > So, doing it the DocBook way lets you take advantage of DocBook
 > software with a minimum of effort.

 > RDFa can still contribute a lot.  The DocBook schema is very
 > extensible, but once you extend it to accommodate RDFa you can add
 > any new properties you want without having to revise the schema.

 Agreed.

 > There's not much point in using RDFa to identify properties that are
 > already part of the DocBook schema,

 Isn't there?  My guess is that such a duplication will make the
 information easier to access by DocBook-unaware Semantic Web
 applications.

 Alternatively, there may be a preprocessing step to add the
 properties encoded as DocBook elements only to the resulting RDF
 graph.  (And a suitable GRDDL transformation seemingly may fit
 such a purpose.)

 > but RDFa is great for adding things that aren't already there.  I
 > wrote more about this at
 > http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/42543/1954 .

 Thanks!

 However, won't the use of non-namespaced attributes be prone to
 name clashes, should the DocBook be revised?  Somehow, I'd
 prefer using, say, “rdfa:property” instead of “property”.

 Unfortunately, the RDFa is only really defined for the
 XHTML+RDFa variant of XHTML, thus I'd probably need to use GRDDL
 anyway.  A brief search on the Web for an existing
 transformation didn't reveal any, though.

 Also to consider:

--cut: http://norman.walsh.name/2009/09/22/RDFaForDocBook --
    Posted by Ed Davies on 22 Sep 2009 @ 07:30pm UTC #

    >you'd need a DocBook-specific tool to extract the metadata

    I'd rather not have to write new XSLT to handle every new
    document-type/metadata-format combination that comes along, which is
    probably why GRDDL never looked too attractive to me.  […]
--cut: http://norman.walsh.name/2009/09/22/RDFaForDocBook --

-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2012 07:57:47 UTC