Tech Talk 3: Practical Web Semantics
April 15th, 2008 – Mailtrust
Posted by Bill Boebel, Mailtrust
Join Mailtrust again on Monday April 28th for a presentation by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar covering the Semantic Web.
When: Monday, April 28, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
Where: Mailtrust, 775 University City Blvd, Blacksburg VA
RSVP: techtalk@mailtrust.com (free pizza!!)
From the Virginia Tech campus, take the Tom’s Creek B bus to the first University City Blvd stop. The bus runs every 10 minutes.
Summary of the talk:
A practical introduction to The Semantic Web and the technologies that enable web developers and bloggers to embed meaning, such as marking up people, places, events, music and locations, into websites. Areas covered will include Resource Description Framework (RDF) basics including CURIEs and N3 notation, implementation approaches such as Microformats and RDFa, and authoring tools such as Operator and Fuzzbot. The talk will be given by Manu Sporny, who is an Invited Expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), one of the primary RDFa Task Force members working on the RDFa specification and the primary author of the hAudio Microformat specification.
If you can’t make it, don’t worry… stay tuned to this blog for a video of the talk shortly after the event.
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2. Manu Sporny… – April 29th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Hi Philip,
I’ll attempt to answer your questions here. We did go over Microformats, but didn’t get too specific since not many of the attendees had any real-world experience with Microformats. The talk focused more on RDFa than Microformats.
To paraphrase what you wrote, “If the goal is standardize some of these things, I think the danger is that we’ll end up with thousands of overly-precise mini-standards”.
The short answer is that “I don’t think this is going to happen”. Here’s more detail on why:
The first reason is due to The Microformats Process, that is the method which we use to create new Microformats, which requires the collection of hundreds of examples from the web. Once we have those examples, we thoroughly analyze them and then propose a few vocabulary words to cover 80% of the examples. This process is performed by the community - there isn’t a single person that makes the decision. Each Microformat is reviewed and scrutinized by many people, reducing the chance that you get a Microformat that “creators of some of these microformats designed them the way they did because it makes sense to them and in their mind, others”. Microformats are designed by a group of people, not just one person.
The second reason is one of production output from the Microformats community. Each Microformat vocabulary takes many months to gather examples, analyze them, produce a vocabulary, test the vocabulary and re-iterate the previous steps until everyone is happy with the standard. I don’t think we’ll end up with thousands of overly precise mini-standards… it goes against the whole Microformats concept of “paving the cow paths”. In other words, the whole “paving the cow paths” thing is a concept that is often mis-understood. It means that Microformats generalize to a large degree and will only work for about 80% of the examples out there. We’re probably never going to have more than 100 Microformats due to the nature of creating Microformats.
Hope that explains it a bit more… if you have more questions, you can read more about the Microformats process here:
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1. Philip Ratzsch… – April 28th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
>implementation approaches such as Microformats…[clip]
Since the talk is presumably over, I’m curious as to whether the speaker addressed claims that microformats merely serve to obfuscate the web further,impose a specific skill set on anyone who would edit a page/app/whatever, and the other skeptical views.
Suppose YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site) decides that it’s going to crawl blogs of it’s users for XFN-ed content and attempt to piece together how everyone knows everyone (XFN being I believe, one of the simpler microformats). Assuming a simple site, it may be written in PHP with a MySQL backend. To be effective in working with the site, one would have to be familiar with PHP, MySQL, XFN, XHTML, and in likelihood a few others (AJAX, Javascript, linux, CSS, web services, et al).
While the idea of ‘pave the cow paths’ I think is well-intentioned, what it comes down to is that everyone has their own ‘cow paths’. When I write something that’s either just for me or for someone I know, the code will be full of structures, constructs, and logic that makes sense to me. And that’s why I use it - just as I’m sure the creators of some of these microformats designed them the way they did because it makes sense to them and in their mind, others.
If the goal is standardize some of these things, I think the danger is that we’ll end up with thousands of overly-precise mini-standards (”If you’re embedding MPEG video in an AJAX-ed Rails app fronted by Nginx for use by Coptic bakers in Somalia…”).
I sincerely hope that’s not the case, and I look forward to being able to watch the video.