[microformats-discuss] directory formats

[Ryan King]

On Aug 25, 2005, at 2:43 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 8/21/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
>> The ideas is to allow a way to make an assertion (albeit weak) that a
>> page is or should be listed in a certain directory.
>
> Something that might be worth looking at is SKOS, the Simple Knowledge
> Organisation System [1]. It's a way of expressing such things in RDF
> (you knew I was going to say that ;-) The initial thrust for it was
> for data integration across thesauri, but there's big crossover with
> directories (see list at [2]).
>
> But even if you're not interested in the RDF side, a lot of the
> problems associated with the directory listing kind of task have been
> broached, could be some useful ideas in the docs.
>
> Your word "weak" is reflected in the way that rather than the usual
> RDF subclassing kind of structures, taxonomy relations are expressed
> as "narrower"/"broader".It means the directory relationships aren't
> quite so directly tied to RDF semantics.

You're right.

But, just for clarity, my use of the word "weak" (as in "weak  
assertion") refers to the fact that when Document A says that  
Document B is a directory listing for Document A, that assertion is,  
at best, weak.

> A bit of real-world potential is demonstrated by the FOAF Output
> plugin for WordPress [3]. This auto-generates a SKOS scheme based on
> the blog user's categorization, and inserts corresponding bits of
> RDF/XML in the RSS feed for category tagging. This is very similar to
> the kind of coolness potential I reckon microformats have got, the
> user doesn't have to do anything special (they're just tagging as
> usual) but the system is transparently producing high-quality,
> globally unambiguous data.

Yes.

> Incidentally, I'm not sure (not got there yet) but SKOS may offer a
> good way of formally expressing the parent/child relationships of XOXO
> data corresponding to the XHTML list nesting. (The GRDDL/XSLT trick
> being used again to map from microformat to RDF).

Hmm.. probably another discussion.

Anyway, I've added a note about SKOS to http://microformats.org/wiki/ 
directory-inclusion-examples

I'll try and flesh it out a bit more when I have time to read the  
SKOS specs. In the meantime, anyone feel free to fill in the details. :D

-ryan

> Cheers,
> Danny.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
> [2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SkosDev/ThesaurusLinks/ThesDownload
> [3] http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress- 
> plugin-foaf-output
> -- 
>
> http://dannyayers.com
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