Rdfa-quotes
From RDFaWiki
General RDFa Quotes
RDFa has more power and expressibility. It is the same difference between Lego and normal-games. With Lego you can build and play anything, with other games you can only use it for the purpose for which it was created.
-- Simone Onofri, RDFa Developer Mailing List
What is RDFa
It's like RSS on crack, but for machines.
RDFa in 10s
Just got 10s to understand what RDFa is? Read through some of the thoughts collected from the RDFa mailing list:
Here's one: When you do a search on the Web for Pascal, the search engine doesn't know if you mean the programming language, the philosopher, or any of a dozen other possibilities. Amongst other things RDFa helps the search engine work out what a page is about.
Another: When you look at a web page about an event such as a conference, you can see where it is, when it will happen, and so on. If the browser knew that too it could offer to add it to your calendar, show a map of the location, find flights there, look up hotels, maybe even offer to fill in your details on the registration form.
-- Steven Pemberton, RDFa Developer Mailing List
This is not my elevator pitch, but David Wood's. I am not sure he reads this mailing list, so I just forward his idea: Think of a credit card. Your name, expiry date, cc number is on it with nice golden letters, the card itself may have all kinds of colours and pictures. That is for the human. If you run it through the card reader, all the essential data is also available for a machine. © David Wood :)
-- Ivan Herman, RDFa Developer Mailing List
short: RDFa is the label on the Jam pot.
longer: Everyone sees that it is a strawberry jam pot. But it's quite cool to have the label explicitly named, and to get other information as well about it the jam pot like the quantity and the origin of production.
-- Karl Dubost, RDFa Developer Mailing List
Between magic ink or whatever CSI blue light + red googles, I would use this description: upon the structure of the page, RDFa allows you to add a semantic layer, you may also say that the layer does not alter the underlaying document, and by this is also peelable. Note: I'm borrowing the term semantic layering from the Magpie semantic browser.
-- Laurian Gridinoc, RDFa Developer Mailing List
Instead of talking about magic ink, I'd say that it's a set of attributes that let you add metadata to web pages so that you can build cool new applications around collections of web pages. (I'm assuming that I'm talking to someone who understands the basics of web pages--otherwise, there's not much point in even discussing RDFa.)
-- Bob DuCharme, RDFa Developer Mailing List
In case you have more time to explain, try this: :) http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/14/introducing-rdfa.html
-- Elias Torres, RDFa Developer Mailing List
Imagine a magic ink on a paper. With a special kind of glasses you can actually see the things written on the paper with the magic ink. HTML is the paper and RDFa is both the magic ink and the special kind of glasses.
-- Michael Hausenblas, RDFa Developer Mailing List
We read from Semantic Web Road Map: The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web.
RDFa has the power of an integration of Semantic Layer in (X)HTML document. RDFa can broke the "major obstacles": a document readable by Humans and Machines BOTH.
