[microformats-discuss] what gets pruned/closed, making existing web data useful

[Danny Ayers]

On 7/13/05, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On 7/13/05 5:15 AM, "Danny Ayers" <danny.ayers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Forgive me, I misinterpreted the word "discuss" in the mailing list
> > name.
> 
> 
> Not at all.  There are tons of things for us to discuss!
> 
> However, there are topics where discussion is counterproductive and/or a
> waste of time (I have sufficient experience on W3C and other standards
> mailing lists to make this observation).  Some topics are don't have the
> necessary cost/benefit to be worth discussing, and thus I will be doing some
> amount of pruning as necessary to keep this list as productive as possible.

Hmm, I'm sorry about my irritable reaction, but there's another factor
in the cost/benefit equation, that of who bears the cost/gains the
benefit.

Using my own RDF/SPARQL play as an example, where there's mixing and
interconnection of data from a variety of sources, for microformats to
be a useful source of data term disambiguation is pretty vital. So
however chicken-little naming clashes might be, their occurrence could
potentially be catastrophic. I really don't think they will an issue,
having profile URI(s) easily available will push clashes way out into
improbability-land. But that does mean there's a far higher premium on
those profile URIs than there would be for say building a stylish
microcontent viewer.

> > These projects have at least one goal in
> > common: putting more useful data on the Web.
> 
> Sort of.  There is actually a very key distinction here in the microformats
> approach that sets a different approach.
> 
> Microformats are much more about:
> 
>  Making the data that people *are already publishing* on the *web* more
> useful.
> 
> Rather than:
> 
>  Putting more useful data on the web.
> 
> That's a fine distinction, but a very important one that focuses our
> efforts.

Thank you, that's a very helpful way of putting it.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com