[uf-discuss] semantic web and microformats

[Kevin Marks]

On Oct 9, 2007 10:27 AM, Tom Morris <bbtommorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> The microformats community works on the basis of having the data
> embedded into the HTML. The RDF/SemWeb approach looks to have a
> consistent data model, and then having as many representations as you
> like of that data model. The data model for microformats differs based
> on which tool you use (perhaps it's in a key-value-pair array, or an
> object, or in an XML format) - even though it's getting the same
> syntax (HTML or XHTML). With RDF, you have the same model (subject,
> predicate, object) but with different syntaxes (XML, JSON,
> (X)HTML-with-GRDDL, N3/N-Triples, TriX, the new JavaScript proposal
> that's been circulating on the W3C semantic web mailing list, internal
> memory models, SQL table etc.

Thats not quite right - the data model for any given microformat is
clear. I think the 'common JSON representation' idea is a good one to
help clarify this.

> There is also value in the 'write the parser once' approach. Each new
> microformat requires a new set of tools - Operator, Tails, X2V,
> Optimus and so on, will have to be rewritten or extended to cover new
> microformats. But RDF tools keep on reading RDF regardless of how many
> new schemas people create. Imagine if we had to recreate the DOM, XML
> parsers, XSLT, XPath, validators, XQuery and the rest of the XML stack
> whenever anyone came up with a new XML-based specification.

That's a little spurious, Tom - the issue is not parsing it, it's
translating the parsed results into something that has meaning to a
human. That you can express things in triple or in nested dicts and
lists is one thing; knowing that one means a name and one means a
phone number is another.