On 14.07.2008, at 09:55, Tom Heath wrote:
Question: is it worth creating a duplicate RDF graph by using RDFa in HTML documents, when there is also RDF/XML available just one <link rel=".../> away, and at a distinct URI? Doesn't this RDFa + RDF/XML pattern complicate the RDF-consumption picture in general if we assume agents will want to do something with data aggregated from a number of sources/locations, i.e. doesn't it increase the cost of removing duplicate statements by creating more in the first place?
I don't know how other stand on this, but I always thought of RDFa and RDF/XML for solutions to different problems. While RDF/XML is the general-purpose solution for publishing to the SW, RDFa to me is mainly a beautiful way of publishing ad hoc, small-scale things to the Semantic Web, particularly in those situations where the author doesn't have access to an infrastructure that allows them to upload triples to an RDF store, or configure a server to perform .htaccess wizardry and other kinds of content negotiation. The prime example (but of course not the only use case) I always had in mind for RDFa are blogs, where the author quickly wants to generate some metadata on the fly. Also, RDFa lends itself nicely to the copy&paste scenario that others have already mentioned, and which is illustrated e.g. in [1] and [2].
RDFa is directly tied to XHTML, which is a format for representing data to humans. Therefore I would argue that RDFa would be most useful for a snippet of a complete RDF graph which is actually interesting for humans. The contact details of a person, the details of an event, the complete reference to a paper, etc.
Cheers, Knud [1] http://sw.deri.org/~knud/papers/MetadataRoundtripWWW2007/ [2] http://kantenwerk.org/shift ------------------------------------------------- Knud Möller, MA +353 - 91 - 495086 Smile Group: http://smile.deri.ie Digital Enterprise Research Institute National University of Ireland, Galway Institiúid Taighde na Fiontraíochta Digití Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh
