BarCamp Vancouver

Seamus and I presented a little about what we were doing at BarCamp Vancouver and we had a great time.  Many kudos to the people that made BarCamp such a success. Read more…

Posted in BarCampVancouver, Events, General Discussion

RDFa Trials and Travails

So I’ve spent the last few days trying to get my head around RDFa, and I gotta say, it’s not easy.  Excessive complexity is a charge often levelled against RDF and it’s something that RDFa was meant to mitgate.  Has it been successful in that?  I would say partially, yes. Read more…

Posted in General Discussion, Microformat and Mark-up, RDFa

Namespaces, Microformats, RDFa, HTML, XHTML

We were recently at Yahoo’s Hack Day and one of the presentations I attended was by the SearchMonkey guys.  What piqued my interest here was that the teaser paragraph talked about augmenting search results with the semantic web — e.g. Microformats, XSLT, RDFa, et al. Hmmm, sounds applicable… Read more…

Posted in Events, Microformat and Mark-up, RDFa, Semantic Web

Web Licensing Needs to Be More Granular

<geek alert>

Presently, all the blogs I’ve looked at (I readily concede there are blogs that I have not looked at ;) ) which assign a license to their content do it on a page or global level. Read more…

Posted in Events, General Discussion, Microformat and Mark-up

Getting the Ball Rolling: Formats for Licensing and Attribution

So even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right?  I think I heard that somewhere before…

With that in mind here’s some preliminary thinking on a licensing and attribution format. Read more…

Posted in Licensing & Attribution, Microformat and Mark-up
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    • Re: RDFa Trials and Travails October 9, 2008
      Hi Ben,Yes, I noticed the newer version, and that vocabularies are no longer mentioned in it. I whole-heartedly agree that vocabularies are an advanced topic and the primer might not be the best place to describe them, but I still think they need an entry point that's a little more accessible than what currently exists.What I'd *love* to see is something along the lines of what I mention at the end of this post - a set of "gold standard" tools (validators and parsers) that developers can use to let them know that they're on the right track without needing to grok the entire RDFa specification.I like the primer overall. I think it does a good job of showing the reason for RDFa and then gives just enough information to get a vague idea of the practice. You've no doubt come across this video tutorial which contains about the same level of information:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldl0m-5zLz4But it's easy to digest... Oohh, flashing lights! ;)I don't think we should underestimate the issue of accessiblity. I see RDFa as reaching out to the "normal" world from the somewhat-airy heights of RDF. It needs to be a welcoming handshake to bring people on board.Cheers.
      roblinton
    • Re: RDFa Trials and Travails October 8, 2008
      Hi Rob,I just noticed that your link to the RDFa Primer is to a 1-year-old draft. Have you checked out the latest version:http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/It should be much simpler and easier to understand.One important issue it does NOT address is the creation of new vocabularies, in part because that's a fairly advanced topic. That said, your feedback on the recent RDFa Primer would be super helpful.
      Ben Adida
    • Re: Play the Web » Blog Archive » Namespaces, Microformats, RDFa, HTML, XHTML October 2, 2008
      Hey Rob,Hope you enjoyed the talk :)If you are worried about embedding in HTML instead of XHTML, then you can use eRDF ( http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki/Main/R... ) instead of RDFa.We turn eRDF, RDFa, and uFormats into RDF without caring about how it got there. That way we don't have to pick a winner, everyone wins as long as the semantic web grows :)Paul Tarjan(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)
      Paul Tarjan
    • Re: RDFa Trials and Travails September 29, 2008
      Thanks for those resources Michael, good links.The vocabulary (or excuse me, ontology ;) that I've put together only adds a few terms so 80/20 theory holds true in our case. These added terms all revolve around describing different kinds of attribution; source, yes, but what nature of source? A copy? Derived work? Inspiration?A shame to have just missed VoCampOxford. That would have been a wonderful trip.Cheers,Rob
      roblinton
    • Re: RDFa Trials and Travails September 24, 2008
      Rob,Fair criticism re vocabularies. In my experience it is about 80% reuse of existing vocabularies (or ontologies, if you need to impress you boss;) and only in few cases you need to invent terms on your own.Please have a look at the following URIs and let me know in case you need more: + http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Onotlogies + http://esw.w3.org/topic/VocabularyMarket + http://www.schemaweb.info/ (not actively maintained)Btw, a good way to develop vocabularies and or exchange thoughts would be a VoCamp (http://vocamp.org/wiki/Main_Page).Cheers,Michael
      Michael Hausenblas
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PlayTheWeb.org is an ad hoc group of Web professionals who are interested in promoting the idea of "Web Play" through the ethical reuse of content on the Web. We want to report, discuss, and promote Technologies, Techniques, Applications, and Business models that move this idea forward.