Ian Davis has an interesting post about the Shadow Web that may be created if we don’t bridge the existing (“clickable”, as I like to say) web and the semantic web:
Current practice in the Semantic Web community is leading to the creation of a shadow web that is becoming disconnected from the web of documents. This fracturing is being caused by the W3C’s decision to restrict the types of resources that can be addressed directly with HTTP .
[...]
This means that HTML and RDF need to be much more connected than many people expect. In fact I think that the two should never be separate and it’s not enough that you can publish RDF documents, you need to publish visible, browseable and engaging RDF that is meaningful to people. Tabular views are a weak substitute for a rich, readable description.
Ian mentions RDFa as one of the technologies aiming to build this bridge. And Benjamin Nowack responds by pointing out how RDFa plays nicely with the fragment identifier practice of the semantic web.
Hi Ben,
The reason RDFa can solve this problem is because it has both
@hrefand@resource. This allows us to distinguish between relationships between documents (@href) and relationships between other things (@resource), or what is known in the trade as the distinction between information resources and other resources. (Whether there is a need for such a distinction is at the heart of Ian’s comments on fragment identifiers.)It’s not something that will excite anyone not interested in RDF
but for those who are, I’ve looked a little at how the fact that RDFa has two attributes helps to solve the problem. The discussion is in Once more on information resources and RDFa.
All the best,
Mark
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Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer
mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com
standards. innovation.
23 Nov 2007 at 12:20