On 18/5/09 21:32, Dan Brickley wrote: > On 18/5/09 16:51, Paul Doran wrote: >> I would advocate using RDFa (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/) >> over microformats. >> >> Benefits of RDFa include (taken from >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa#Benefits_of_RDFa): >> (1) Publisher Independence - each site can use its own standards >> (2) Data Reuse - data is not duplicated. Separate XML and HTML >> sections are not required for the same content. >> (3) Self Containment - The HTML and the RDF are separated >> (4) Schema Modularity - The attributes are reusable >> (5) Evolvability - additional fields can be added and XML >> transforms can extract the semantics of the data from an XHTML file >> >> I think (1) could be important for mysociety as it could develop it's >> own vocabulary to describe things not covered by exisiting >> microformats. >> >> Using RDFa would also allow mysocity to become part of the linked open >> data initative (http://linkeddata.org/). > > I don't think an "RDFa versus Microformats" argument would do this list > much good, but for what it's worth I'd be happy to help with any > exploration of RDFa. I don't yet know my way around the mySociety data > structures or code, but if someone takes the lead on this I could find a > bit of time to help with code or checking things from an RDFa > perspective. Am also quite happy to see Microformats go up there, but am > not particularly in a good position to help with any detail there. > > Maybe there are some scenarios where data can usefully be cross-linked > with the efforts mentioned in > http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/04/23/more-rdfa-goodness-from-uk-government-web-sites > or > http://assets.expectnation.com/15/event/3/SemWebbing%20the%20London%20Gazette%20Presentation%201.pdf > ...? > > This discussion is also quite related to APIs ... is there an overview > presentation anywhere of all the mySociety APIs, and any overlap or > commonalities between them? > > I see http://www.groupsnearyou.com/api/
I also see I hit send by accident. Sorry about that ... Where was I? ah yeah, APIs... http://www.groupsnearyou.com/api/ --geo rss lookups by UK postcode, USA Zipcode, or lat/lon Then I found http://www.mysociety.org/api/ which lists some others: ...also Geo RSS on fixmystreet. petitions.number10.gov.uk has misc feeds PledgeBank - feeds feeds feeds. WhatDoTheyKnow - feeds feeds feeds. The fanciest by far is http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/ ... and that's where I'd probably start if I wanted to make a custom RDF/RDFa schema that captured a useful chunk of MySociety's world. Looking at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/docs/getMPsInfo?id=11458&fields=&output=js#output (and http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/stephen_williams/bristol_west ) there's all kinds of richness there which could be put into microformatty/RDFa XHTML... though I wonder whether it might be easier just to make an RDF/SPARQL database dump of the underlying databases, if it's in SQL there. (Q: Is all this structured data held in SQL behind the scenes?). eg. "public_whip_rebelrank" : "387", is quite interesting, and seems to correspond to "<strong>Hardly ever rebels</strong>" in the HTML. Whether the actual number is worth exposing in the microformats/RDFa depends on what we'd expect to see it used for. RDFy folk would probably want to aggregate it with other information and run queries in SPARQL. I'm not sure what Microformats use cases would focus on. For the RDF side, I'm sure having it in RDF would be great and all, but there is simply so much detail available in the API, all of which is RDF-able, that exposing via RDFa would probably be a bit too much... thinking a bit out loud, cheers, Dan _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
