EARL Primer notes

Hello all,

I don't know if this is too basic, but here are some initial thoughts. I 
looked through the RDF tutorials and primers and "RDF for dummies" but they 
all jumped right into techno-jargon.  I was trying to bring it to a level 
that a wider audience could understand, but I might have been aiming too 
wide.  Let me know.

<basic-intro>
When we speak with someone we agree on which language we will use to 
communicate.  I am an American who knows 10 words of Japanese.  When I 
travel to Tokyo I have to find people who speak English in order to 
communicate.

Luckily, context helps constrain the concepts that we might need to 
discuss.  For example, at the grocery store we are primarily talking about 
prices.  We can use a digital display of the number (at the cash register 
or on a calculator) to agree that we are both talking about the same number.

Therefore, depending on context, the words and concepts that you have to 
choose from will change.

When machines communicate, they also must agree on which language to use 
and that the concepts mean the same thing for each of them.  With EARL we 
are creating a language for machines to talk with each other about the 
qualities of Web content or of an authoring tool or a user agent.

EARL allows someone to describe how well Web content or a tool follows 
guidelines or specifications.  For example, using EARL you can describe if 
a particular image is used in an accessible way on a Web page.  Or if a 
user agent displays SVG images properly.  "Properly" is defined by the SVG 
specification.  "Accessible" is defined in WCAG.

When we speak to each other, our words are used in an order that has been 
defined in the grammar that we use.  In English, our basic sentence 
structure is "noun verb object."  For example, "the dog howled at the moon."

We can create sentences that are much more complicated but we can boil them 
down to noun/verb/object.  For example, we describe more about the dog and 
how it howled and what the moon looked like and why the dog howled, but the 
basic structure is the same; "The cute Siberian husky named Iko howled 
deeply at the full moon last Thursday when his owner forget to feed him 
dinner."

In EARL, we also deal with triples.  They are similar to a noun/verb/object 
triple, but instead we call them subject/predicate/object.

</basic-intro>

I could then get into reification (e.g., the more complex "dog howled at 
the moon" example - how each piece could contain more info) and then get 
into code examples and describe how the pieces fit together.  Start w/basic 
statements (like the ones generated by Sean's bookmarklet) and get into 
more complex ones (like the n3 examples).

Thoughts?
--wendy
--
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
seattle, wa usa
tel: +1 206.706.5263
/--

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 13:52:10 UTC