Re: Is RDF What I'm Looking For?

It sounds to me a little like you're one of the things RDF is looking for, as
well as it being what you are looking for.

I am also interested in the problem of how people create RDF, and how people
create RDF or find vocabularies (and XML vocabularies, which I think of as
being a closely related problem), without being coding experts.

There are a couple of documents that you might be interested in. One is the
XML Accessibility Guidelines, which attempts to document the kinds of
features that XML languages need in order to make them support accessibility
to people with disabilities. http://www.w3.org/TR/xag

The other is called "Accessibility and Visualisation - some Preliminary
Ideas" and is essentially some notes about how the Semantic Web might support
W3C's accessibility work (written from a semantic web perspective as a
contribution to, not from WAI, which is W3C's activity in that area). One of
the sections looks at ways the Semantic Web might support techniques for
meeting these requirements:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/w3c_note_sw_accessibility/#XAG

There are some related bits of work around "ontologies" and "thesauri",
looking at how people can create interoperable data, and there is work in the
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative on cataloguing or finding RDF schemas, which
is also relevant.

Cheers

Chaals


On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Chuck Irvine wrote:

>
>I have a keen interest in developing some software and think that RDF
>might be the right base technology, but I'm not sure. A little advice
>would be much appreciated. There is a great deal of RDF subject matter,
>and I'd rather not invest a lot of time becoming immersed in it, if it's
>really not appropriate for what I'm trying to do.
>
>The software that I have in mind would be useful to anyone authoring
>structured information to be published on the web. Just as anyone should
>be able to create an html page, anyone should be able to author a RDF
>Resource or RDF Schema. Just as raw HTML isn't appropriate for general
>authors, even more so, raw RDF isn't appropriate either.
>
>Even a GUI that facilitates writing RDF but still exposes its arcane
>nature isn't appropriate. Things should be presented in common
>terminology whenever possible, i.e. "concept" instead of "RDF Schema",
>"type of" instead of "subclass", etc.
>
>The author should be able to reference the information published other
>authors. When I write an HTML page, I can reference a page that someone
>else wrote. When I author an RDF Schema, I should be able to easily
>reference someone else's schema.
>
>Here, of course, is where power of structured information really comes
>in. The software should facilitate the authoring efforts of the user
>based on pre-defined, referenced concepts. For example, if I am
>authoring information about the design of a new automobile, the
>authoring software should facitate my efforts since I have referenced an
>"automobile" schema of some sort. If my mom what's to author a recipe
>book, that should be facilitated by "recipe book" and "recipe" schemas.
>
>I could go on, but I don't want to waste a lot of your time.
>
>In short, my view of the semantic web is a system that greatly
>facilitates the authoring and publishing of highly structured
>information content (dare I say "knowledge"?). Specifically, my interest
>is NOT in the automated reasoning capabilities that RDF offers. The
>latter is very important, I'm sure; it's just not what I happen to be
>motivated by.
>
>Thanks. I look forward to your response.
>
>Chuck
>
>
>

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2003 01:10:10 UTC