[uf-discuss] Hello / Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

Mon Nov 7 08:22:05 PST 2005

Hi John,

Another data point is the (ongoing, intermittent) work Henry Story,
Reto Bachmann-Gmuer and myself have been doing on representing Atom in
RDF/OWL [1]. Key considerations are trying to be faithful to the Atom
spec and aiming for a (comparatively) lossless model, compatible with
the Semantic Web. A significant consequence is that individual entries
are versioned, there isn't the "new version of item replaces old"
implied behaviour found in most aggregator models.

There is obvious overlap/intersection between this and the SIOC model,
but that's not a problem from the RDF point of view using
subclass/subproperty and equivalence relationships.

I honestly don't know the best approach to take in terms of
microformats. David's hAtom does compromise between Atom's way of
doing things and XHTML's, so reuse of the terms he's using may well be
appropriate for SIOC. SIOC could potentially be expresssed in XHTML
pretty much however you like, with GRDDL as the mechanism for
extracting the data. This approach is generally consistent with the
mechanics of  microformats, if not necessarily the initiative's
process & practices. Obviously gelling with these would be desirable.

On the issue of namespaces & prefixes - the general approach taken in
the context of microformats (correct me if I'm wrong guys) is not to
attempt to generalise to the extent of IanD's RDF-in-HTML, rather to
define more domain-specific formats. Disambiguation of names
(attribute values) within a document is achieved through (for want of
a better phrase) Intelligent Design, i.e. the 'approved' microformats
are constructed with the prior intention that naming clashes won't
happen. Disambiguation on the Web at large is achieved through the use
of profile URI(s), (<head profile="htttp://...">), effectively
namespacing the vocabulary in a lightweight, authoring-friendly 
fashion.

Hope the weather's good in Galway ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://atomowl.org/

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http://dannyayers.com