[uf-new] I*-Notation MF

[Danny Ayers]

On 19/11/2007, Ernad Besirevic <ernadb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok. Thanks for your answer. I'll try to analyze the hCard and I hope can
> use this to develop my own MF. More about I*-Notation you can find here:
> http://istar.rwth-aachen.de/tiki-index.php?page=iStarQuickGuide. It is
> not so simple specially for someone whoe has contact for the first time
> with MFs. Thanks.

Just to reemphasize what Scott said, it's not just about the markup, a
key part of microformats is their community development process:

http://microformats.org/wiki/process

I hadn't encountered I*-Notation before either, thankfully it has a
Wikipedia entry:
[[
i* (pronounced "i star") or i* framework is a modeling language
suitable for an early phase of system modeling in order to understand
the problem domain.
]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I*

Interesting stuff, and some of the terms I encountered a while ago,
when trying to put together a general-purpose project vocabulary in
RDF:

http://purl.org/stuff/project/

(oops, looks like I have a bit of server config to do there - the doc
is also at:
http://dannyayers.com:88/xmlns/project/index.htm )

- which suggests some other ways in which you could express i* in HTML:

1. a custom, microformats-style vocabulary without the microformats
process (essentially as Scott suggested, using Plain Old Semantic
HTML)
2. an eRDF representation
(http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki/Main/RdfInHtml)
3. an RDFa representation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer)

While all three allow data to be read from the HTML, there's a subtle
difference in emphasis: Plain Old Semantic HTML could be more
domain-oriented syntax; eRDF is regular HTML but with conventions for
class names etc which are mapped to RDF constructs; RDFa is an
extension to HTML with a document type which allows extra RDF-oriented
attributes to be included.

All three approaches, like microformats (assuming a profile URI is
used) allow automatic interpretation of RDF data using GRDDL:

http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-primer/

btw, I've an update to my project vocab planned for the near future,
mostly doc tweaks (must read up on i* first!). I also want to map
relevant parts to the terms that are available in existing
microformats -  essentially TODO (tasks) and date/times from
iCalendar/hCalendar.

Cheers,
Danny.