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

[Dimitri Glazkov]

Wow. Excellent discussion. And Ian, welcome to the list!

I would like to chime in with my own 3/4-baked thoughts.

RDF and HTML are very closely related, because one is subset of
another. Yes, from the infoset perspective, HTML is a form of RDF.
It's just the former is limited to only two (implied) predicates:

* holds/contains
* links to

All other relationships have to be defined in "rel", "rev", "class",
"type", etc. attributes and are not part of the baseline semantics.
So, let's not try to juxtaposition the two -- there is a reason why
they seem so similar at times.

Also, it is no surprise that holding/containment relationship is so
overwhelmingly dominant in the current Web -- hierarchy is the most
natural and easiest thing to grasp conceptually for us, the sapient
ones.

So, the rest of argument really comes down to addresing these two questions:

a) Is there a need to express more relationships than the two
mentioned above? Looking at XFN, No-follow, and pretty much the whole
microformats movement, the answer is undoubtedly yes.

b) Is it a near-future possibility that the definition and expression
of relationships in popular serialization formats (ahem) will be
strong enough to treat Web as the universal database, rather than data
mine? I hope nobody argues that the stronger, the better.

:DG<