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

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi guys,

On Oct 24, 2005, at 8:35 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
Danny wrote:
>> Sorry, that doesn't work. RDF is optimised for modelling things and
>> relationships between them. HTML is optimised for rendering  
>> documents.
>
> Humans don't model things and the relationships between them,  
> generally.

Huh?  Okay, now you've *both* got me thoroughly confused. :-)

Last I checked, humans are *entirely* designed around relationships.   
Geez, doesn't anybody here have a social life? (pauses, realizing  
he's sending email at 9:30 PM at night...).

Uh, forget I said that, and turn to the whole relationship thing.  
This may be going beyond microformats to RESTafarian land, but in my  
worldview the whole point of URLs is to express relationships between  
documents.  In fact, it is trivial to map any element of a database  
onto a URL:

http://host/database/tableName/primaryKey?columnName=Value

And I'm pretty sure some thesis or other proved you can normalized  
any data into a relational database (as long as it isn't Quantum  
entangled :-).

Given that, I don't see anything fundamentally different between  
expressing relationships as RDF triples vs. a "rel" between two  
documents.  You may not like the syntax as much, but so what? What  
exactly does that syntax (or rather, the relational model behind it)  
actually get you?

Puzzled in Sacramento,
-- Ernie P. 

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org>
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/