Shelley Powers on the Myths and Realities of XHTML: I mean, if working with RDF has taught me one thing, it’s that converting between two different forms of serialization is trivial—it’s the underlying model that matters. Exactly! And still, many who are in the integration business think that XML schemas is the only product required to exchange data between multiple parties. The serialization format(s) should be based on the use cases of the information....
I have been searching for quite a while now and apparently there is a missing piece of software waiting to be made. If you are working with RDF data in any way you have probably created a vocabulary using OWL and/or RDF schema sometime. This works well for all technologists out there but in my world vocabularies should be created by domain experts rather than developers. Domain experts do not know OWL or RDF schema....
I have been playing with the excellent ARC framework for a small legal information project (more on that soon). I am beginning to think that many RDF usage scenarios involve data in files (stored in a file system) combined with a triple store that preferrably should be kept in sync with the files. Inspired by Niklas Lindström’s Oort I wrote a small plugin to do that in ARC. The plugin extends the ARC2_Store class with a sync_with_folder($path_to_folder) method....
You may ask yourself “who is that?” or “wtf?!” but the fact is that in the near future he will have a much greater impact on your life than you may think. Here is why you should head over to his blog and post a random comment about Yak shaving and, if possible, create a link containing the words “Yak shaving” pointing to his blog. With a little bit of effort and luck Google will pick it up and Niklas will be the number one result for people from inner Mongolia....
Over the christmas holiday I had an idea and developed the foundation for a small application which involves RDF, a SPARQL endpoint and a bunch of ordinary web pages available in a number of languages. Each page is a representation of a paper document that exists in the real world. Each real document has been assigned a URI like http://example.com/act/31977D001. Thus it represents a non-information resource. What should happen if you enter that URI in a web browser?...
James Simmons writes about some of the pros and cons of Microformats and RDF (with an extended discussion at InfoQ). On the benefits of Microformats (with which he means Microformats.org-style microformats) he mentions: Designed for humans first, machines second Modularity / embeddability Enables and encourages decentralized development, content, services A design principle for formats Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns Highly correlated with semantic XHTML I am new to RDF and the semantic web (but have used microformats in previous web projects) but to me the advantages of RDF and RDFa (the “sprinkling” framework) are clear....
This will be the first in a series of posts on RDF for beginners. I hope it will be of use for people who are new to RDF but have some background in software development. One of the reasons I am putting this online is to get feedback on how RDF and the semantic web can be explained without sounding like an overenthusiastic preacher. Another reason is that most of the information I find about RDF is written by bearded researcher men....