Danny Ayers wrote: > On 28/02/07, Ben Adida <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Danny Ayers wrote: >>> David, one quick question - does Exhibit already expose RDF in any form? >>> >>> If not, RDFa (and/or eRDF) is pretty much as good as exposing it in >>> any form, thanks to GRDDL. >> I'd say it's better, but I'm biased :) >> >> It's better because it gives you the locality property where, with the >> right tool, you can point and click to a row in the table and get the >> related metadata. With GRDDL, you lose the relationship between the >> rendered and the structured. > > If that's important information, it should be captured in the GRDDLing > - why should it be lost?
Guys, please, let's color the bikeshed another time. There is really no point in arguing which approach is better to RDFize information: if it works for you, great, if not use something else that does. And if nothing does, create your own. Personally, I dislike GRDDL as long as it keeps ties to XSLT, as XSLT is a *horrible* way to write RDFizers compared to, say, javascript. [and it's not for lack of XSLT knowledge that I say so] If there was a standardized object model for RDF stores in javascript (sort of a DOM for RDF), then you could imagine having cross-platform GRDDL in javascript (and yes, I'm aware that W3C wants to standardize that), but for now you're stuck with XSLT. So, Ben says RDFa is better because more explicit, you say GRDDL is better because allows you to RDFize even stuff that is not RDF to start with (like microformats) and I say that scraping is better than GRDDL because I can use a real programming language and because I don't need to have any RDF buy-in from the data publisher. Still, there is room for all the approaches, as they don't really prevent the others from being beneficial as GRDDL is way easier to perform on RDFa content than on microformats (one GRDDL xslt stylesheet would work for all RDFa pages!), scraping is way easier on both RDFa and GRDDL-ed content (the scraper could simply use the GRDDL stylesheet when found or parse the RDFa directly when found). Here David is asking "what is the benefit of RDFa" and given the ability we have to scrape anything we want out of any page, it's a rather fair and subtly demanding question, IMO. What I would like to see is exhibit supporting RDFa content embedded in the same HTML page. This means that one can have an exhibit out of an RDFa page just by simply adding a few lines, no need for an external JSON file (which would also make the content useful to google and to any other crawler that is exhibit aware). Right now, to have an RDF export from Exhibit, you have to run it! which means that you can do that automatically only from very advanced crawlers like Crowbar. (which is why the json data is dark matter to crawlers today) Before Crowbar, we were kinda stuck in looking for <link> tags in the exhibit pages (or heuristically parsing the js files for URLs that terminated with "js"), now we can just invoke the Exhibit object and the exporters programmatically. But I continue to think that having RDFa data embedded right in the page could be useful. -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
