- From: Jeni Tennison <jeni.tennison@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:55:11 -0400
- To: Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
- Cc: "www-tag@w3.org List" <www-tag@w3.org>
Hi Ian, I have a long-standing TAG action [0] to supply some text for the web page: http://www.w3.org/standards/webarch/metaformats I've given a draft below. What would we have to do to get this text onto that page? Jeni [0] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/actions/610 --- Metaformats are generic formats that people can adopt when creating their own application-specific languages without having to reinvent syntax. The terms that people use to specialise a metaformat are often called vocabularies. Examples of metaformats are XML [1], RDF [2] and JSON [3]. Metaformats offer advantages over creating a custom syntax for a language because they can be processed by generic tools, and languages that use them can be understood by people who have learned about the metaformat. Metaformats usually have a schema language that can be used to define or describe a vocabulary that uses that metaformat, and query or transformation languages that can be used to access information within documents that use that metaformat. What is XML? XML provides a simple standardised way to serialize information representable as labelled trees with annotations and cross-references, allowing a free choice of markup vocabulary. This not only makes it well-suited for human-authored documents, particularly given its facility for mixed content (plain and marked-up text) and built-in support for Unicode, but also means it is a useful syntax for all kinds of machine-to-machine data transfer. XHTML [4], Docbook [4a] and DITA [4b] are examples of XML-based languages primarily intended for documents; machine-to-machine uses include Atom [5], UPnP [5a] (for networked device discovery) and AEMP [5b] (for construction equipment). There are several schema languages for XML, including XML Schema [6] and RELAX NG [7], which enable XML-based languages to be validated. There are also generic methods for querying and transforming XML through XPath and XSLT [8], XQuery [9] and XML Processing pipelines [10]. What is RDF? RDF is a language designed for the expression of arbitrary information about arbitrary things. It has variant surface syntaxes including Turtle [13] and RDFa [14], the latter allowing embedding in HTML and thus promoting machine readability of information found in HTML documents. RDF is useful for expressing graph structured information in which each entity is linkable through a URL [11] and is thus the core data model for the Semantic Web [12]. Common RDF vocabularies, which can be used with any RDF syntax, are Dublin Core Terms [15], FOAF [16], SKOS [17] and schema.org [18]. RDF vocabularies can be described by RDF Schemas [19] or OWL Ontologies [20]. These are primarily used for inference: to deduce new information from data expressed in RDF. More flexible reasoning for RDF can be described using RIF [21]. Data stored within RDF stores, known as triplestores, can be queried and updated using SPARQL [22]. What is JSON? JSON is a metaformat that is useful for expressing tree-based data structures. JSON's key benefit is that it tersely expresses the kinds of data structures commonly used in programming languages, particular Javascript, which makes it very easy to create and consume. JSON is rarely used with a declarative schema and it is usually processed by being parsed into the native data structures used by a particular programming language. However, there are several query languages currently under development, including JSON Path [23], Jaql [24] and JSONiq [25] [1] http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/ [2] http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ [3] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627 [4] http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/htmlcss [4a] http://docbook.org/ [4b] http://dita.xml.org/ [5] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 [5a] http://www.upnp.org/ [5b] http://www.constructionequipment.com/aemp-releases-telematics-data-standard [6] http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/schema [7] http://relaxng.org/ [8] http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/transformation [9] http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/query [10] http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/processing [11] http://www.w3.org/standards/webarch/identifiers [12] http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ [13] http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/ [14] http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdfa [15] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ [16] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ [17] http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/skos [18] http://schema.org/ [19] http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdf [20] http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/owl [21] http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rif [22] http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/query [23] http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/ [24] https://code.google.com/p/jaql/wiki/JaqlOverview [25] http://jsoniq.org/ -- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com
Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 16:51:15 UTC