I've been trying to weigh up the pros and cons of these two approaches to
understand more clearly when you might want to use each. I hope that the list
members will be able to provide me with the benefit of their experience and
insight!
So the situation is that I have some information on a topic and I want to make
it available both in machine readable form and in human readable form, for
example a company wanting to publish information on its products, or a
government department wanting to publish some statistics.
I can either:
1) include 'human' and 'machine' representations in the same web page using RDFa
2) have an HTML representation and a separate RDF/XML representation (or N3 or
whatever) and decide which to provide via HTTP content negotiation.
So which should I use? I suppose it depends on how the information will be
produced, maintained and consumed. Some generic requirements/wishes:
- I only want to have one place where the data is managed.
- I want people to be able to browse around a nicely formatted representation
of the information, ie a regular web page, probably incorporating all sorts of
other stuff as well as the data itself.
- I don't want to type lots of XHTML or XML.
- I want the data to be found and used by search engines and aggregators.
The approach presented by Halb, Raimond and Hausenblas (
http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2008/papers/06-halb-raimond-building-linked-data.pdf)
seems attractive: to summarise crudely, auto-generate some RDFa from your
database, but provide an RDF/XML dump too.
On the other hand I find that RDFa leads to rather messy markup - I prefer the
'cleanliness' of the separate representations.
For any non-trivial amount of data, then we will need a templating engine of
some sort for either approach. I suppose what may tip the balance is that
Yahoo and Google are starting to make use of RDFa, but AFAIK they are not (yet)
doing anything with "classic" content-negotiated linked data.
Anyone care to argue for one approach or the other? I suppose the answer may
well be "it depends" :-) But if so, what does it depend on?
Thanks in advance
Bill Roberts
