

The Structured Web - nslater
http://groups.google.com/group/whits/t/dd87bcac1f187f70
Why the Semantic Web didn't work, won't work, and what we can do about it.
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bergie
The Semantic Web utopia suffered from pretty bad chicken-or-egg problem: why
would anybody publish semantic data when nobody used it, and why would anybody
consume it when none was available. Instead of the utopia, I'm seeing
technologies of the Semantic Web stack pop up in different places... CMSs
publish RDFa for SEO purposes (see Google's Rich Snippets), and for example
MeeGo's Tracker data handling layer is actually an RDF triplestore, with
SparQL provided as the main API for app developers.

Apart from these, I see the big potential for these technologies in
integration: if you publish your content with RDFa annotations, your site has
an API 'for free'.

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akozak
It might not seem like it, but publishers are coming around (at least in some
domains). RDFa is getting traction as a source for metadata in communities
like education and open content (disclaimer: it's part of my job to convince
people in this area why they should also publish RDFa metadata).

I'm convinced that this will be a gradual thing that takes hold in certain
areas where it's immediately useful, and from there extends to other areas,
sort of like the beginnings of the internet.

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bergie
Yep, I'm also seeing positive signals. Both the SEO and the integration ("your
website is your API") angles seem to work pretty well with publishers.

In the IKS Project we're trying to implement some semantic features to many
popular Open Source CMSs. When that is built-in, there will be lots more RDFa
out there... <http://www.iks-project.eu/>

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hxa7241
I got the impression that something was going to be proposed, but it seemed
vague . . . is there something being proposed?

On the 303 stuff: I don't understand the problem. RDF can talk about various
things, not just web pages: RDF uses general URIs, which could be URLs, URNs,
or whatever else is invented. If you don't want to make statements about a web
page, you don't use an http URL. What is the need for using 303 responses?

And I don't understand the JSON comparison. Sure, RDF in XML is dismal, but
RDF in Turtle is OK. The core, real, RDF is just URI triples -- subject,
predicate, object -- it is already very simple, elegant, and powerful. How
does JSON help?

I do like the idea of RDF/data-web/GGG uses and applications, but I can't
figure out what this article is really trying to say.

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tav
Nice article. I would argue that JSON is suited for a structured web though.
Imagine even something like RSS turned into a JSON structure — if everyone
would simply publish open JSON feeds we could have a lot of interesting
client-side applications...

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nslater
Sure, JSON seems to have lots of uses.

I know a few people who've been working on a JSON Schema for the more formal
datasets. I worked on an Internet Draft for this for a while, before the
effort crumbled. Like most of the Web though, JSON really tends to shine when
it is semi-structured — with any additional structure applied to it, post-hoc,
by the consumer. CouchDB is a good example of a system that embraces this
property.

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robg
What's the "old Atom wiki"?

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nslater
I wasn't actively involved, but as far as I know, the old Atom wiki was the
birthing place of Atom. Sam Ruby hosted it on his site, and got a lot of
discussion around the idea of a new syndication format. I believe it was
called Echo for a long while.

<http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage>

