Semantic Wave: RDF Archives

If you are curious about where microformats and metadata are headed (and haven't checked out RDFa), take a look at the W3C's RDFa in Javascript page. There, you'll find the RDFa Highlight bookmarklet. Save this to your bookmarks and then run it on a page that contains RDFa such as the RDFa Calendar Test Page. View source on that to see how the content is structured into data using some simple attributes.

The implications of standard, structured data that can be easily coded - and extracted - are simply huge. Imagine if, without too much additional effort, the blog entries and other kinds of simple web content that you regularly post could be easily mashed up, aggregated, or saved into local apps.

To understand more, check out Elias Torres' excellent and brief write-up of his Open Data in HTML presentation at XTech 2007.

Perhaps this is not the most cost-effective approach, but I can see all sorts of uses for Oracle's NDM in online games. :)

These are all great developments. Within the next year, I hope to clear up some of my own mental metadata about my computer's file system. What will I do with all of the extra space?

There is quite a gap between RDF the system and RDF the format. Call me slow or just plain new to this, but it takes a bit of a mental flip to transform one into the other. Mr. Beckett's approach allows the programmer to understand both the intent of the RDF system as well as the meaning of the information at hand.

<graph xmlns="http://ilrt.org/discovery/2004/03/rxr/">
  <triple>
    <subject uri="http://purl.org/net/dajobe/"/>
    <predicate uri="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator"/>
    <object>Dave Beckett</object>
  </triple>
</graph>

Source. Posted by Jamie Pitts at 5:12 AM | TrackBack (0)

April 22, 2004

TalkBack: Reply on My Blog

RE:
How to Make Blogging More SemWeb Friendly,
RSS Conversations,
Topics in Weblogs,
Threads of Conversation.

This particular fork got started here.

Blog-to-blog conversations are easily fragmented, with responses residing on blog discussion boards, the responder's site, and on various tracking services.

I have been thinking about how to implement a "reply on my blog" link which would enable a writer to reply using his own CMS.

Implemented with current web technology, this idea assumes that the API of the responder's blogging software can be known to the site which he is responding to. This reply would link to a script on the original site, which, after noting the action, would redirect the request to the content management system under the responder's control.

RDF for the original entry (and historical data about the conversation) would be passed to the responder's CMS in the url string. He would respond. As his CMS updates his blog, his response would be forwarded on to the cited blog (which would be expecting it), trackers, aggregators, and online communities.

Additional concepts:

the responder would be provided with a standard blog posting page, perhaps with: a listing of links in the original post, metadata about the discussion, information about the participants, a way to view the conversation tree, etc.
any metadata (such as dc:Subject and the tracking service of choice) assigned to the entry by the original blogger could carry over to the responder, who could add additional metadata. But how much metadata should accumulate?
the effort to implement something like "reply on my site" would add to the culture of interoperability between sites (as TrackBack did)
threading, summarization, and other forms of conversational analysis could be performed by any interested party, provided that the RDF can be obtained from each participating site
organized conversation forking could be supported

It would be a big convenience if we could automatically generate a visual summary of interesting web conversations (such as this current one).

Posted by Jamie Pitts at 7:10 PM | TrackBack (2)

April 2, 2004

Implementing Not in RDF

Norman Walsh has put up a must-read essay about implementing the semantics of "not" in RDF (by way of PlanetRDF). His "green leaves" example makes use of cwm, an RDF processor which is very easy to deal with.

Posted by Jamie Pitts at 6:07 PM | TrackBack (0)