Get coding Ian!

Like CSS, to most people RDF seems to offer nothing but a new way to solve an old problem. However, for those that have needs beyond a single document or a single data silo, RDF offers something genuinely different. Sharing data, combining data from different sources, evolving schemas – all these things are strengths of the RDF model and it’s only now that people are seeking to break down the walls and share data at Web scale.

For most people they’re solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved because they aren’t experiencing pain when trying to do the things microformats are supposed to make easier.

It’s more than ironic that you make this point. Doesn’t this apply to RDF as well? There are already some good examples of how Microfomatting your content extends it’s reach.

Consider 3 reviews, one plain text, one marked up with hReview, and one marked up with RDFa. Which one would show up at http://kitchen.technorati.com/search/ ?

Embedded-RDF and GRDDL (both of which I use) allow me to provide a route to RDF triples to say “this page is geo-located here”. Fine. As a web-developer, the code requirement is easily fulfilled and invisible to humans surfing.

Microformats (which I also use) allow me to annotate in the page-body such that browser plugins may suggest actions to take based on the data. The code requirement is not too onerous (as long as I don’t have conflicting CSS classes for any other reason) but it has page-design ramifications: I can’t see how to make the data be a (lat,long) pair but the display be a placename, for example.

So already we see differences in nature and goal of the two sides of the technology. I think the microformats approach is going to be fighting an uphill battle: requiring people to have firefox and use Operator then hoping IE starts doing it, etc… that’s a hard way to gain traction. The alternative is to invent a new class of software, “things that process eRDF and GRDDL”; do you remember when the feed aggregator landed on your desktop as a must-have-running class of utility in its own right?

Thanks very much for your thorough write up and constructive suggestions in response to my comment. I’m going to be rereading this post a few times and adding a bunch of things to my microformats to-do list as a result. I’m looking forward to more “aggressive collaboration” on such efforts, and I stand by my predictions that a wide variety of semantic web approaches will rapidly blossom in the near future.

Thanks,

Tantek