[microformats-discuss] FYI: two posting about the Semantic Web, the "SynWeb", scraping and microformats

[Danny Ayers]

Thanks for the pointage David!

They're long posts, I could probably summarise the microformats bits as:

- microformats are useful whether or not you subscribe to the 
Semantic Web vision*
- microformats are _especially_ useful if you employ Semantic Web
technologies, as there's an existing framework in which the data can
be exploited (RDF)
- scraper-like techniques for extracting explicit data from docs are
on the rise...
- ...but if you use microformats (done right), essentially you'll be
deterministically serializing/parsing standard formats, not scraping,
there isn't the same fragility
- all of this good for the Web

* there is a big difference between SW the vision and SW technologies.
The latter can be useful without bothering about the former (but it is
a bonus). If you look at the SW stack, an old diagram of which is
copied at [1], then microformats pretty much *are* SW technologies.

Anyhow I thought Phil's analysis got a lot of things right, and he
highlighted a lot of key issues. Naturally I also disagreed with half
of it...but it took me half the morning to say which half. Time better
spent coding? I dunno.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://dannyayers.com/2005/09/cake.gif

On 10/24/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> wrote:
> Phil Jones:
> http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2005/10/alternatives-to-semantic-web.html
>
> Danny Ayers:
> http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/10/24/an-alternative-the-synweb/
>
> Regards, etc...
> David
> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>


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