W3C Approves RDFa 1.1 for HTML5

http://www.w3.org/News/2013#entry-9919

by mindcrime • 13 years ago

66 42 13 years ago

taliesinb• 13 years ago

Quick poll: is anyone here using RDF in their technology stack? What has your experience been like?

jerven• 13 years ago

As an early adopter it was though (since 2008). However, if you are starting today it is not bad. And RDFa (lite) is a really easy way of getting in to it. Just make you site indexable using schema.org and RDFa for Google et al is a nice start.

I work for UniProt (a databases for biologists) and for us it is really a nice way of providing data to other users to integrate into their own systems. We also provide a sparql endpoint at beta.sparql.uniprot.org for other scientist to run analytical queries without having to deal with running a large datawarehouse of their own (beta.sparql.uniprot.org). i.e upload 5kb of SPARQL queries to us instead of downloading a 100Gb of data them to run SQL in their own systems.

These days there are a number of off the self systems that work well enough. Your main danger in the beginning is trying to deal with existing (large) public data before you are ready. The philosophical/reasoning side of the semantic web can also be very confusing but can be ignored in the beginning. Just use RDF as graph data format and SPARQL as a query language and you are good to go.

possibilistic• 13 years ago

How do you like working for UniProt? Where are you guys based?

In the future I'd like to work at a place like this, so if you could tell me more I'd be grateful. (My email is in my profile.)

Thanks!

rpwverheij2• 13 years ago

Yes, I've been working with RDF(S) and OWL in the past 3 years. I find it extremely usefull for reasoning, and in general pretty cool to work with. Having all your data in a forward directed graph, including your Ontology (data structure) has some very interesting potentials. When I started with this project 3 years ago, I had to work with SPARQL 1.0 (the query language for triples/RDF), which was a bit troublesome sometimes. But now that SPARQL 1.1 has become a reccomendation, it is becomming well implemented, and working with it maked my queries quite elegant and fun again. Some people say the semantic web has long been dead since guys like google started their own semantic formats. Personally I think that's true at all. The vision/potential of the semantic web remains potent as ever. The tools are slowly but surely maturing. The field perhaps seems not that big, but it is surely active and growing. I think in time we'll see plenty of semantic web stuff entering the general field, and RDFa may be another helpfull bridge tool along the way.. Though in all honesty, I havn't worked with RDFa at all yet, so can't say much about that, but will surely have a look at this spec soon.

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

It's pretty cool. We use Apache Jena and some related Apache projects as our main SW stack, and it works pretty well. If you aren't real experienced with SPARQL, RDF, etc. and want to see some cool demos of what the Semantic Web enables, check this link for a taste:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess?v=6yg

The biggest fly in the ointment right now, IMO, is that working with larger datasets, with queries that require complex inferences via OWL, are crazy computationally expensive. And while there is research underway on the subject of parallelizing this stuff so it can run on clusters, I wouldn't say that that is a solved problem yet. So you can need some pretty honking fat software if you want to do really complex stuff.

agibsonccc2• 13 years ago

I use it in a question answering system. DBPedia/Basekb/other random data sources backed by a search index and sparql allows you to do some cool things.

samsquire• 13 years ago

I'm a believer in the semantic web.

I highly recommend this app: https://bitbucket.org/alexstolz/rdf-translator for converting between:

Microdata, RDFa, RDF, JSON-LD, N3 and N-Tuples

I recommend Apache Fuseki if you want to do some querying over tuples.

I'm currently trying to build a semantic living document editor and I've been experimenting with Fuseki to do so.

http://samsquire.github.io/livingdocuments/

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

Very cool. I'm also a believer in the Semantic Web vision, and we are starting to incorporate some elements of the semweb stack into our projects. Apache Stanbol is another wicked cool SW related project from the ASF, and we're doing a lot of work with it now. Fuseki is also very cool.

agibsonccc2• 13 years ago

Another thing of note here are the different databases RDF traditionally uses.

Take a look at: https://github.com/openlink/virtuoso-opensource

This is the triples store traditionally used. You will also want to look in to sparql.

An example link: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/j-sparql/

The syntax is a bit weird, but it's not that different from a document store.

For those of you who use the Facebook API, you can also get RDF data out with the rdf Accept header. Something neat to think about.

justincormack• 13 years ago

Hold on, whats this XHTML5 they mention? We dont want XHTML5!

The W3C is just a weird organization, basically owned by some members who pursue their own agendas, producing reams of "standards" that, largely, no one uses, or even implements. Tim Berners-Lee is a great guy but it is a failed organization as far as I can see.

untog• 13 years ago

I wish we'd made HTML5 from XHTML, actually. But alas.

jms18• 13 years ago

Why?

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

We dont want XHTML5!

Speak for yourself.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

Maybe that is a little harsh but I noticed that. Some working groups have obscure people who enjoy generating standards and come up with alphabet soup standard abbreviations and then spend a lot of effort convincing the world that they need it.

RDF is one of those things, JSON-LD is another. Most efforts I have seen so far involve trying to convince me that I need it. It wasn't me looking for a solution. There is a big difference.

ris2• 13 years ago

But there are also some working groups that don't seem to understand the concept of a _standard_.

rpwverheij2• 13 years ago

That might be true in some cases, but - for me - that's certainly not true of RDF (and the whole familly of semantic web standards produced by the W3C). After a lot of selfstudy on something quite similar to RDF/triples I was really glad to come across the W3C standards that were already there. Using the 'frameworks' of RDF,RDFS and OWL enourmously reduces my workload and greatly enhances my capabilities for the A.I. development I'm doing.

yuhong2• 13 years ago

It exists even in WHATWG HTML. It it just not encouraged.

yuhong2• 13 years ago

Tim Berners-Lee is a great guy but it is a failed organization as far as I can see.

There is a reason why I pushed the TAG to finish this:

http://www.w3.org/wiki/Evolution

(Clue: TimBL is part of the TAG.)

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

what's this XHTML5

It's HTML 5 that's an XML dialect. That's right: XHTML 2 died, but you can use XHTML5 instead.

Groxx2• 13 years ago

  <p xmlns:ex="http://example.org/vocab#"
     xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
    Two rectangles (the example markup for them are stored in a triple):
    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
      property="ex:markup"
      datatype="rdf:XMLLiteral">
    ... svg ...
    </svg>
  </p>

Does `property="ex:markup"` and `datatype="rdf:XMLLiteral"` seem to anyone else like a phenomenally bad idea? Don't inject namespaces in values! How would you escape that anyway?

Is there some reason we don't have e.g. <svg ex:property="markup" rdf:datatype="XMLLiteral" />, or can you not do that with XML? And if so, why not? It seems like it would be very useful for mixing in data like this.

porges• 13 years ago

Property and Datatype are in the HTML namespace* and their values are namespaced identifiers (in XML, QNames).

The identifiers are namespaced so that if you have differing vocabs with the same property names (or datatypes), you can distinguish which one you're talking about.

Your proposed transformation means that Property lives in the example namespace, meaning it has a completely different interpretation, which is specific to the example namespace.

*: (before someone pulls me up on this, it's not 100% correct)

Groxx2• 13 years ago

ah, so 'property' and 'datatype' are intended to be paired, and intended to be used to store namespaced values? I can't really find anything describing them as such, but then they're about as difficult to search for as it's possible to be :/ if you have a link, I'm curious and I'd appreciate it, but I'll take you at your word :)

Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth (you can't have two on the same element, for example. unless you can whitespace-separate them? and still, what if your value contains a colon?), but I guess less so.

drderidder• 13 years ago

I tend to agree the W3C is a bit pointy headed. Still, some kind of referee is needed to keep the browser-makers playing fair. Firefox's switch from RDF to JSON for bookmarks was anecdotal evidence that the RDF format was just too obtuse for a lot of practical use cases. Way back I tried modelling data in RDF; it was challenging and not well received internally. By comparison the JSON modelling I've done recently has been intuitive, easy, and well received. Although I used be be a big fan of RDF, its become a relic, and modelling relationships isn't so hard a problem that you need RDF to do it, IMHO.

thenerdfiles• 13 years ago

Who cares ? Templates are JSON data anyway, in well-established meta-media domains: http://schema.org/AssessAction

All you end up arguing for is how well your Text Editor implements things like git or LightTable watches over text objects.

Sublime text, for example, only gives a deprecated Skeumorph of the microwave when in Find/Replace mode. Compare this to vim/Fuf,Unite, the fact that in this eco system one also discovers Gundo, grep, etc. easily pluggable within this system. Don't do any of it __at__ compilation, so who wholly cares? (Holy C, anyone?)

Vim enables enhanced Python (mocka chaining permutations of tags, WebObjects) development along with things things like Zen Coding and haml linters, which do we decide; does it matter today, tomorrow? And what have you learn'd in the meantime ?

I for one welcome our COBOL Overlords: https://github.com/eevee/project-euler/blob/master/heteroglo...

artificialidiot• 13 years ago

At least it doesn't look actively harmful to what we already have.

W3C Approves RDFa 1.1 for HTML5

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