- From: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
- Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:09:43 +0200
- To: "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Cc: "Peter Krantz" <peter.krantz@gmail.com>, www-html@w3.org
On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:15:30 +0200, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote: > > Steven Pemberton wrote: >>> It would be quite clear to a human reading that in an article of some >>> sort that Tony Blair is the Prime Minister without any additional >>> markup. >> How about if it was an article about the Dutch prime minister? Would >> it be clear to you then who it was? > > Let's see: > > "The Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, will today travel to..." > > I think it's quite clear to a human reader that Jan is a Prime Minister. You're missing the point. The text we are talking about doesn't contain the name of the prime minister, and we are not authorised to change the text. However we are authorised to add metadata. In this case, the metadata is the name of the prime minister. This makes the text more useful for several use cases. > It's not clear from that sentence which country he is from, but that > wasn't indicated in original example of Tony Blair either. However, one > can assume the sentence would be in the context of an article that would > indicate such information, or the sentence could have been written more > like either of these: > > "The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, will > today travel to..." > > "The Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, will today travel > to..." If you are authorised to change the text, you can do this (though many sources don't, for instance a quick search yieds this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5322314.stm, that talks about Mr Brown,and the chancellor, but assumes you know they are the same); it also does not make the link between name and role explicit. The advantage of machine-readable semantics are many. Searches become better for instance. There are already semantic-oriented search engines, such as Clusty, but they often have to guess, and therefore can get it wrong (for instance a search for Pascal does split the result into programming language/philosopher etc, but the first search result for the philosopher is actually about the unit of pressure named after him; a search for prime minister does split the results into countries, but one of the results listed as being about Tony Blair is actually about Neville Chamberlain). Best wishes, Steven Pemberton
Received on Thursday, 7 September 2006 10:09:56 UTC