Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

> I am all in favor of summaries (where appropriate?) and in fact think they
> are an important part of the indexing (they are the "what" and "why") and
> will play a major part in making the Semantic Web usable. Such materials
> are what they mean by "Resource Description" the first two items in the
RDF
> acronym!

Hopefully it will be fossible to automatically generate site summaries in
the SW. You could do it now I suppose, by extracting all of the headings and
so forth, but really page semantics need to improve first. (task: develop an
XSLT script to extract useful page summaries). Actually, Dan Connolly has
already done this: for the W3C homepage. If you look at the source of
http://www.w3.org/ you'll note the profile attribute in the head element.
That points to Dan's hacking around in XSLT and RSS. (Er...try
http://www.w3.org/2000/07/hs78/ if I remember correctly). It's useful, but
it uses class attributes to do it, so it's not the best solution. If we
could embed Dublin Core descriptions into a page, it would make things a lot
easier.
On another similar note, he also created an XSLT for screen scraping RDF
data from HTML:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Mar/0103.html
Quoth DC:
Summary: "I believe that one of the best ways to transition into RDF, if not
a long-term deployment strategy for RDF, is to manage the information in
human-consumable form (XHTML) annotated with just enough info to extract the
RDF statements that the human info is intended to convey." - Dan Connolly,
ibid.
So it appears that annotation mechanisms (I favour Dublin Core, for now) are
the way to go.

Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/swr/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/
"Perhaps, but let's not get bogged down in semantics."
   - Homer J. Simpson, BABF07.

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2000 11:41:58 UTC