RDF Blog

A blog covering the Resource Description Framework, in plain English.

Website semantics, choose your weapon

21/10/2008 11:47
posted by chris ward.

Found an intriguing tool from a quick google today, a score matrix for allowing you to choose the right semantic-web technology for your app.

In the line-up is Microformats, eRDF and RDFa ...

Compared for the following features, each technology is scored for your requirements;

  • DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
  • HTML4 / XHTML 1.0 validity
  • Custom extensions / Vocabulary mixing
  • Arbitrary resource descriptions
  • Explicit syntactic means for arbitrary resource descriptions
  • Supported by the W3C
  • Follow DCMI guidelines
  • Stable/Uniform syntax specification
  • Predictable RDF mappings
  • Live/Web Clipboard Compatibility
  • Reliable copying, aggregation, and re-publishing of source chunks. (Self-containment)
  • Support for not just plain literals (e.g. typed dates, floats, or markup).
  • Triple bloat prevention (only actively marked-up information leads to triples)
  • Possible integration in namespaced (non-HTML) XML languages.
  • Mainstream Web developers are already adopting it.
  • Tidy-safety (Cleaning up the page will never alter the embedded semantics)
  • Explicit support for blank nodes.
  • Compact syntax, based on existing HTML semantics like the address tag or rel/rev/class attributes.
  • Inclusion of newly evolving publishing patterns (e.g. rel="nofollow").
  • Support for head section metadata such as OpenID or Feed hooks.

With reports of the scoring being biased towards RDFa (well of course, it's extensible stupid!), there is a caveat that it probably isn't the one to go for, for lack of a W3C Recommendation "Spec".

But since last tuesday, that should be an invalid argument now... I'd love to see this document updated to reflect that, Benjamin? :)

Either way, fill your boots ;)

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