Category: Semantics

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RDF Semantics

Acorns

From Jamie Pitts an article in the Guardian Spread the Word, and Join Up. In it, Tim Berners-Lee is quoted from a recent talk about new directions in RDF and the Semantic Web. I can agree with him when he says, The nice thing about RDF data is you can merge it.

More than a ‘nice’ thing–to me, it’s the key to the concept, and what sets it apart from any other data model.

Tim B-L goes on to talk about new directions in semantic web effort, including getting data out on the web:

Berners-Lee did concede that as with the world wide web, the semantic web should “serve useful stuff”. “One of the problems we’ve actually had with the semantic web, I only recently realised, is we haven’t been doing that.”

Not enough useful RDF data has been left online, he explained: “The whole value-add of the web is serendipitous re-use: when you put it out there for one person, and it gets used by who-knows-who. We want to put data out there for one purpose, then find it gets linked into all kinds of data. And that’s been not happening, because we forgot ’serve useful stuff’, not to mention ‘make useful links’.”

It’s a direction many of us have followed, without necessarily any positive acknowledgement from the greater Semantic Web community. I can read with relief the new directions Tim B-L perceives, but then I’m puzzled when he continues with:

Berners-Lee told his audience in Oxford that the semantic web has already been adopted in drug discovery in life sciences, where solutions represent cures for diseases. “People in these fields are bright and intelligent, they are early adopters, they have quite a lot of money to throw at a problem,” he said. “We have an incubator community there.”

Genome data could be extremely helpful for the medical community, but I wouldn’t necessarily see this as a way to make RDF ubiquitous. I would wish that the W3C would stop focusing on Grand and Glorious data uses. We all can’t be research scientists.

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RDF

RDF: The next operating system

Speaking of Danny, he’s pointed to two terrific RDF resources:

The first is ActiveRDF allowing access to RDF data from Ruby-on-Rails. This one I can’t wait to try.

The RDFRoom — using RDF to create a virtual 3D room. Appropriate after my last post.

I wonder how OPML could be used to create a 3D room? It would probably consist of one, looong, staircase.

Categories
RDF

Think of the children

Danny Ayers sends a plea along to the semantic web folks working with RDF:

This may seem a strange request from an RDF fan who is on record calling OPML bloody awful (or words to that effect). But I’d like to humbly ask that anyone exposing RDF services on the web consider also emitting the following :

1. Content supplied as RSS 2.0 and Atom
2. Simple resource relations as OPML

In a word: no.

As Danny writes later in his post, by exposing our RDF data as OPML and RSS 2.0, people using tools that work with both can access the data, and eventually they may realize that there’s a lot of rich data out there and maybe they should take a closer look at RDF. It’s an interesting backdoor method to getting ‘the word’ out, and normally I would give it consideration.

Not anymore. If you all want to use crappy specifications, that’s your problem. Spending my increasingly rare free time coding to something like OPML means I have that much less time to create applications that work with a carefully designed and tested specification like RDF. If people don’t want to use my applications because I’m using RDF–even if they’re never directly exposed to the RDF–well, then I’d say they’re less interested in the application, and more interested in being a part of the buzz. Frankly, then, they’re not the type of people I’d want to use my applications.

I will never be part of the buzz. If I spend the next four months sucking up, I will still never be a part of the buzz. I am an outsider, which means that I’m free to do exactly what I want. What I don’t want, is to work with OPML and RSS 2.0.

When Henry Ford was asked what color options the Model T would have, legend has it he answered, “You can have any color you like, as long as it’s black.” OPML is a black Model T, and RSS 2.0 is a black Model T with only one gear: reverse.

Categories
RDF Semantics

Useful SemWeb posts

This efficient ways to store graphs in MySQL will come in handy.

The RDF/A draft for embedding RDF in XHTML has been released. I did a quick look at the spec and it does look good — the microformats people will be happy to see it.

I still believe that we don’t need to embed RDF directly into our web pages because many web sites are dynamic now. As such, if one accesses the page as a human, you get data formatted for human consumption through a browser; if you access the page as a webbot, by attaching /rdf to the end of the document, the same data is formatted for mechanical consumption. No need to clutter up web pages, or make page creation or generation that much harder.

However, have said this until blue in face, and am left feeling like tree falling in forest. So I’ll just point you to the spec while I do my own thing, secure the knowledge that it doesn’t matter how the data gets there, it’s all compatible thanks to RDF.

Categories
RDF Specs

Proving yet again

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

…why Atom is the only syndication format to use (if you all persist in finding RDF too hard that is, and go icky poo with RSS 1.x).

Rogers Cadenhead:

In part to address his concerns (and some voiced by Palfrey), I launched a new site for the board and we’ve been working on a newly written specification that seeks to resolve long-standing issues with RSS that make it difficult to implement, such as a lack of clarity on whether an item’s description is the only element that can carry HTML. (The spec’s not official — it’s published to solicit public review for at least 60 days. I encourage people who are interested in it to join the RSS-Public mailing list.)

Winer has now decided that the board doesn’t exist and never had authority over the RSS specification, even though it has published six revisions from July 2003 to the present.

God giveth. God taketh away.