Re: How to put an annotation in HTML?

Hi John and Denny,
the problem is well known and RDFa has its limits. Please see the new 
ITS 2.0 spec [1], which provides a solution for this. ITS 2.0 will 
likely be widely adopted by CMS and translation industry and it has an 
RDF transition using NIF[2] .

@Denny: For your request RDFa should be fine, if you just want to include:
<http://sws.geonames.org/4951788> a owl:Thing .

Note that the resulting RDF does not contain any provenance information, 
so I am unsure, whether calling it an "annotation" is appropriate. It is 
rather an inclusion of extra triples in HTML.
You are loosing any reference to "Springfield" as RDFa parsers don't 
support this.
Turtle in HTML would also be an easy option: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/#xhtml

ITS 2.0 example:
<p>It is well known, that <span 
its-ta-ident-ref="http://sws.geonames.org/4951788" >Springfield</span> 
has mild summers and short, but hard winters.</p>
NIF:
...
<http://example.com/doc.html#xpath(/p[1]/span[1]/text()[1])>
     itsrdf:xpath2nif <http://example.com/doc.html#char=23,34> .
<http://example.com/doc.html#char=23,34>
     rdf:type              nif:RFC5147String ;
     itsrdf:taIdentRef  <http://sws.geonames.org/4951788> ;
...

Well, NIF is more for natural language processing tools and middleware, 
so it's overkill for just including the occasional triple now and then ...

All the best,
Sebastian



[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/#conversion-to-nif

Am 24.04.2013 22:08, schrieb John Flynn:
>
> I have long thought that a clean and simple method for identifying 
> terms in HTML that are instances of a specific ontology would be a 
> very valuable adjunct to the growth of the Semantic Web. A number of 
> years ago I proposed an approach to a solution I called Instance 
> Markup Language (1) which gained no traction. The consensus at the 
> time was that RDFa would provide the solution for this need and also 
> that it wasn't really important because the great bulk of instance 
> data would come from large data bases and not from HTML. I don't think 
> RDFa has in fact provided a "clean and simple" way to identify 
> specific terms in HTML text and link those terms to classes or 
> properties in a specific ontology. I never thought my proposed 
> approach was exactly right, but I did have hope it would inspire 
> someone come forward with a similar, but cleaner, way to do this. Even 
> though the subject still occasionally come up, after all these years 
> it's pretty clear I was wrong about this being an important component 
> of Semantic Web technology.
>
> (1) http://mysite.verizon.net/jflynn12/IML.htm
>
> *From:*Denny Vrandečić [mailto:denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de]
> *Sent:* Wednesday, April 24, 2013 1:59 PM
> *To:* semantic-web at W3C
> *Subject:* How to put an annotation in HTML?
>
> Sorry, probably a stupid questions:
>
> Let us say, I have some HTML like this...
>
> <p>It is well known, that Springfield has mild summers and short, but 
> hard winters.</p>
>
> And now, for example in order to simplify extraction, I want to 
> annotate Springfield with an URI, maybe like this, to make sure that 
> the computer understands I mean the Springfield in Massachusetts:
>
> <p>It is well known, that <span 
> about="http://sws.geonames.org/4951788/">Springfield</span> has mild 
> summers and short, but hard winters.</p>
>
> How do I actually do that?
>
> Mind you, I don't want to add whole triples, but just annotate the 
> HTML and say "this element refers to the following URI".
>
> Cheers,
>
> Denny
>
> -- 
> Project director Wikidata
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-- 
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , 
http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org