I agree, with Bernard (and also with an earlier comment of Mark's): if
we are talking about widespread adoption of RDF, we need to think of
who is currently creating HTML, and how they are doing it. I think we
all know this, but it's easy to forget when we spend all our time on
the web or with fellow geeks.
- The techy guys creating web sites for big organisations and
corporations will be fine - they can configure their servers, write
code, integrate with databases etc, though they will definitely need
help and education in the short to medium term on choices of ontology,
good data design practices etc.
- Most small businesses get someone else to develop a website for them
and there is a large industry of small web design shops supporting
this. (Sometimes it's just a friend or a family member that "knows
about computers"). Setting up hosting and maintaining sites is
typically part of the service. So we need to get the message out to
this army of consultants. Many will need easy to use tools to enable
them to add RDF effectively.
- Most "self-written" HTML is in blogs and social media tools, so we
need very easy to use RDF producing plug-ins for those - which in
practice probably means limited choices and lots of automatic pre-
configuration.
So we need to be building tools. I don't think it matters where the
data is hosted as long as maintaining the data is easy for whoever has
that responsibility.
Regards
Bill
On 26 Jun 2009, at 09:48, Bernhard Schandl wrote:
Mark,
And everyone knows at least one way to publish HTML, don't they?
I disagree. Most people know how to enter text into a form, but they
have no clue what HTML is all about, how it comes that one line of
text is bigger while the other is smaller, how backlinks and
permalinks are created and resolved, and so on.
The difference between publishing HTML and RDF (in whatever form) is
exactly the difference between the Web and the Semantic Web: the
former is "just" human-readable material, while the latter is
machine-interpretable. Just as one needs to know the grammar and
vocabulary of English in order to publish a proper textual
description of goods, one needs at least basic understanding of the
grammar and vocabularies of the Semantic Web to publish proper RDF
data about these goods.
Even if blogs, CMS, and whatever other tools there are support the
user in authoring RDFa with a nice GUI, it will be still up to the
user to correctly select property URIs and to properly format
literal values so that they can be used by a generic (!) RDF client.
Alternative: tools that do some sort of NLP / Entity Recognition /
Information Extraction become so mature that they can be reliably
deployed into mainstream blogs, CMS, wikis, ...
By the way, the same applies to the client side: in terms of
applications we must get beyond the tabular rendering of RDF data.
This is nice, but in the end it provides not much more value to an
end user than a nicely formatted HTML page. The things that Google
and Yahoo do are a good step in this direction.
Best,
Bernahrd
