Ian Hickson wrote:
To reiterate: I have approached and been approached by a number of people
in the RDF and RDFa communities, and I have repeatedly asked for people to
list problems and use cases that are of relevance in the context of RDFa
and RDF, with those problem descriptions not mentioning RDFa or other
technical solutions. So far we have seen *very few* of these.
Ian,
I am quite relieved by your response.
Here is an attempt at a use-case:
When writing HTML (by hand or indirectly via a program) I want to
isolate at describe what the content is about in terms of people,
places, and other real-world things. I want to isolate "Napoleon" from a
paragraph or heading, and state that the aforementioned entity is: is
of type "Person" and he is associated with another entity "France".
The use-case above is like taking a highlighter and making notes while
reading about "Napoleon". This is what we all do when studying, but when
we were kids, we never actually shared that part of our endeavors since
it was typically the route to competitive advantage i.e., being top
student in the class.
What I state above is antithetical to the essence of the World Wide Web,
as vital infrastructure harnessing collective intelligence.
RDFa is about the ability to share what never used to be shared. It
provides a simple HTML friendly mechanism that enables Web Users or
Developers to describe things using the Entity-Attribute-Value approach
(or Subject, Predicate, Object) without the tedium associated with
RDF/XML (one of the other methods of making statements for the
underlying graph model that is RDF).
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
