[RDFa] Dissemination (was: RE: [RDFa] Telecon Monday - 1400 UTC)

Mark, Ben,

First I have to apologize not giving a precise description of what I mean (oh 
those semantics ;)
The point was mainly about _deployment_ not syntax. I am aware of the fact that 
"we won't have full 
backwards compatibility with microformats" (Ben), and that _one_ reason why 
RDFa is so powerful,
is root in the fact that we need "only one parser for all vocabularies" (Ben, 
again:). As Mark
pointed out "... since blogs and wikis are very quick ways for people to 
'publish' [...] means
that [...] you can now publish RDF just as easily". Yes. Quick, and not-dirty ;)

Now the message is: We are in the comfortable position that we do not need to 
kind-of-invent
application areas or demos (remember the "OWL wine ontology" 8-), we just need 
to look out in the 
"real world" (as blogs, etc.) and trying to convince the communities to 
"upgrade" from microformats to RDFa.
A "best-practice-guide", loooots of examples and peradventure some services 
(based on e.g. [2]) should
be available to make this transition as smooth as possible.  

Another branch worth following IMHO could be to other assist (tekky) 
communities (as http://apache.org/,
http://sourceforge.net/, etc.) to go for RDFa. I started a very limited demo 
how this could look
like in the SWD Wiki [3].

Nevertheless I subscribe also to Evan Prodromou [1] thoughts:

"However, I'm concerned that µf's (as the Unicode hipsters call them) aren't 
going to be able to scale with the growth of small-s semantic content. I think 
we're 
going to need namespacing to make general-purpose semantic Web processors work 
correctly, 
and I think we're going to need to re-use the existing data formats that have 
already been 
built as RDF. I also think the RDF model is extremely powerful for capturing 
knowledge, 
and I think it's a good idea to leverage rather than discard that." 

Finally I'd be very happy to contribute to the success of RDFa (deployment) by 
helping with the
UC document (TBD at our today's telecon, I guess?)

Hear you soon!

Cheers,
        Michael

[1] http://evan.prodromou.name/RDFa_vs_microformats
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2006-08-08-hgrddl-xhtml1
[3] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/RDFaTestbed

----------------------------------------------------------
 Michael Hausenblas, MSc.
 Institute of Information Systems & Information Management
 JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
  
 http://www.joanneum.at/iis/
----------------------------------------------------------
 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: mark.birbeck@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:mark.birbeck@xxxxxxxxx] 
>On Behalf Of Mark Birbeck
>Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 10:54 PM
>To: Ben Adida
>Cc: Hausenblas, Michael; public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@xxxxxx; 
>public-swd-wg@xxxxxx
>Subject: Re: [RDFa] Telecon Monday - 1400 UTC
>
>Hi Ben,
>
>I agree with your points, in particular about microformats and RDFa.
>But I wonder if what Michael is getting at relates to something we've
>also discussed before, which is that since blogs and wikis are very
>quick ways for people to 'publish' to the web without having the whole
>paraphernalia of web-servers and the like, then it means that if you
>can publish HTML (via Drupal, Blogger, Wordpress, and so on), then you
>can now publish RDF just as easily.
>
>In my experience of RDF over the years, particularly with FoaF, the
>question of 'publishing' your own metadata has always been
>problematic, and RDFa provides the 'missing link'.
>
>Can you clarify Michael?