Re: Using RDFa to produce self-describing HTML

Dear TAG members,

The RDFa Task Force and the XHTML 2 working group are aware that you had  
some discussions about RDFa at your 20 May f2f meeting.  Thanks for  
considering our document, and also our input during your meeting.  After  
reviewing your minutes, we have had more discussions about it in the RDFa  
task force (with XHTML 2 people present) and wanted to provide you with  
some additional information.

First, we believe that what you are trying to do is tightly define how  
engines on the semantic web can discover semantic relationships in a  
deterministic way.  We agree that this is critical to the continued  
evolution of the semantic web, and want to ensure that we participate  
fully.  Thanks for bringing this important issue to our attention.

Second, we consider that XHTML documents have ALWAYS contained  
relationship information, but without a well-defined mechanism for  
extracting that information.  Therefore, it is reasonable to define the  
way that this relationship information can be expressed as RDF.

However, we think this issue is independent of the media type used to  
deliver the containing document. Sections of XHTML may be embedded in  
other namespaces in multi-namespace documents, and delivered using a  
non-XHTML related media type, and yet the RDF relationships should still  
be extractable.

With these things in mind, we feel the best course of action is to declare  
that all documents using the xhtml namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml  
are capable of being interpreted to produce RDF triples.  In order to  
support the follow-your-nose use case and support your semantic web model,  
we propose that we update the document at the end of the namespace URI to  
indicate there is a GRDDL processor (as described in [1]) AND that we  
update the prose to indicate that RDF can be extracted using the rules  
defined in the RDFa Syntax document [2].

We would like to know 1) is our assumption about your concerns correct,
and 2) if this course of action would help address those concerns.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-grddl-20070911/#ns-bind
[2] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Drafts#rdfa-syntax

Best wishes,
Steven Pemberton
For the XHTML2 WG and the RDFa TF

Received on Friday, 6 June 2008 10:39:04 UTC