[uf-dev] JSON representation of semantic objects

[Manu Sporny]

We've been struggling with writing user action scripts for Operator for
hAudio. The problem comes in when one has to operate on semantic objects.

Currently, there are two different ways of representing semantic data in
Operator, one for eRDF/RDFa and another for Microformats. This is quite
a headache for anybody trying to develop an action script that operates
on 'vcards', 'vevents' or 'haudio'.

Ideally, the action script shouldn't care where the semantic object came
from (eRDF/RDFa/uF/whatever).

The problem gets more complicated when applications want to share the
semantic objects that they've discovered between each other. In short,
we don't have a serialization format that I know of... and it would be
nice if we gave developers a framework to follow.

We've been attempting to solve this problem using JSON serialization of
Microformats using hAudio as a testbed, it seems to be a viable candidate:

http://microformats.org/wiki/haudio-serialization

We would like to see this implemented in Operator as it will make it
easier to develop user scripts. It will also help Operator export
semantic objects that it detects on pages to other Firefox plug-ins that
consume semantic objects.

So what do people think? There is interest from the W3C/RDFa groups on
solving this problem, would this community be interested in contributing
to the discussion? Is it time for a serialization format for semantic
objects?

-- manu