[microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds -> microformats

[Danny Ayers]

On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> wrote:
> Consider all the microformat data already out there on the web -- for
> example, all the events in 'evdb'. Add to the mix the XML/RDF data sets
> available -- for example, lists of airports, FOAF files and so forth.
> And finally, the various tools that have been made to manipulate and
> query XML (in general), RDF (in particular) and semantic-web data (more so).
>
> Now consider the following queries:
> - where could I fly to visit a friend and see the San Diego Chargers
> play on a weekend that I have free
> - if I did fly there, what's the names of my friend's family and pets
> - (your variant query here)
>
> To pull these different threads together as concrete demonstration of
> the power of the upper/lower case semantic web would be, like, the coup
> of the decade. But who among us could rise to such a challange...? :-)

Heh.
It is funny, that kind of aim is clearly there in TimBL's old design
notes, but still there's no major app that does it. It gets more
remarkable by the day, now there are microformats to supply the data
(with GRDDL getting it into the store(s)) and SPARQL to offer a
relatively easy route of querying cross-domain. There are still
significant issues like scalability and querying across sites, but
most of the specs are in place and the basic kit needed has already
been implemented, available off-the-shelf. e.g. I've been playing with
integrating my to-do list kind of project info with material from RSS
feeds, HTML-based docs and FOAF using Redland (with Python). Mostly a
simple matter of programming ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.


--

http://dannyayers.com