<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Jacob,<DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Oct 24, 2005, at 1:46 PM, Jacob Ham wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">Can anyone recommend any books to catch up on "the vision" of a semantic web? I have gone over some of W3C's RDF stuff, and a couple other things on the web. But from what I have gone over (not much), the complexty of the system make its hard to imagine to be implimented by the normal web developer (not trying to degrade web developers, but question the specifcation). </BLOCKQUOTE><BR><DIV>Well, that's why microformats were invented, because most of us couldn't figure it out either. :-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"> Recommendations? <BR style=""></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>IMHO, the whole point of microformats is to make it easier for machines to *extract* semantics from human-readable code. The best way to get the vision is to install FireFox and run the GreaseMonkey demo:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><A href="http://microformats.org/wiki/greasemonkey">http://microformats.org/wiki/greasemonkey</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>That made much more sense to me than a roomful of documents. :-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Now imagine a world full of tools like that, extracting all sorts of structured data directly off of human-readable web pages, allowing them to be stored, remixed, and re-presented in different formats.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>That's the (lowercase) semantic web, microformat-style.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The official "Semantic Web" is pretty much the same, except populated entirely by machines. :-(</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Unfortunately, for that we first need to create a machine smart enough to build the entire Web by itself. For some reason, humans hate having to work for machines. :-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>-- Ernie P.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BR>Cheers,<BR>Jake<BR><BR><DIV><SPAN class="gmail_quote">On 10/24/05, <B class="gmail_sendername">Tantek Çelik</B> <<A href="mailto:tantek@cs.stanford.edu">tantek@cs.stanford.edu</A>> wrote:</SPAN><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On 10/24/05 9:43 AM, "Danny Ayers" <<A href="mailto:danny.ayers@gmail.com">danny.ayers@gmail.com</A>> wrote:<BR><BR>> [1] <A href="http://dannyayers.com/2005/09/cake.gif">http://dannyayers.com/2005/09/cake.gif </A><BR><BR>There are just soooooo many things wrong with that diagram that it's hard to<BR>know where to start criticizing. In fact, not sure it is worth criticizing,<BR>so I'll just point out the only pieces that I think make at least some <BR>amount of practical sense:<BR><BR>* URI (and even then I'm starting to dismiss URNs are mostly academic, thus<BR>leaving only URLs),<BR>* Unicode (I admit, because of my last name I'm biased here)<BR>* XML (a reasonable foundation, even if XML+tidy works better in practice) <BR><BR>The rest are best left to academics IMHO.<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR><BR>Tantek<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>microformats-discuss mailing list<BR><A href="mailto:microformats-discuss@microformats.org"> microformats-discuss@microformats.org</A><BR><A href="http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss">http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss</A><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">microformats-discuss mailing list</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:microformats-discuss@microformats.org">microformats-discuss@microformats.org</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss">http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>------------ </DIV><DIV>Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org></DIV><DIV>Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker</DIV><DIV>Probe-Hacker blog: <A href="http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/">http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/</A></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>