.htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

[kidehen]

Dan Brickley wrote:

> +cc: Norm Walsh
>
> On 25/6/09 19:39, Juan Sequeda wrote:
>> So... then from what I understand.. why bother with content negotiation,
>> right?
>>
>> Just do everything in RDFa, right?
>>
>> We are planning to deploy soon the linked data version of Turn2Live.com.
>> And we are in the discussion of doing the content negotiation (a la
>> BBC). But if we can KISS, then all we should do is RDFa, right?
>
> Does every major RDF toolkit have an integrated RDFa parser already?
>
> And yep the conneg idiom isn't mandatory. You can use # URIs, at least
> if the .rdf application/rdf+xml mime type is set. I believe that's in
> the Apache defaults now. At least checking here, a fresh Ubuntu
> installation has "application/rdf+xml                             rdf"
> in /etc/mime.types (a file which I think comes via Apache but not 100%
> sure).
>
> But yes - this is a major problem and headache. Not just around the
> conneg piece, but in general. I've seen similar results to those
> reported here with "write yourself a FOAF file" exercises. Even if
> people use Leigh Dodd's handy foaf-a-matic webforms to author a file
> ... at the end of the session they are left with a piece of RDF/XML in
> their hands, and an instruction to "upload it to their sites". Even
> people with blogs and facebook profiles and twitter accounts etc. can
> find this daunting. And not many people know what FTP is (or was).
>
> My suggestion here is that we look into something like OAuth for
> delegating permission tokens for uploading files. OAuth is a protocol
> that uses a Web/HTML for site A to request that some user of site B
> allow it to perform certain constrained tasks on site B. Canonical
> example being "site A (a printing company) wants to see non-public
> photos on site B (a photo-sharing site)". I believe this model works
> well for writing/publishing, as well as for mediating information access.
>
> If site A is an RDF-generating site, and site B is a generic hosting
> site, then the idea is that we write or find a generic OAuth-enabled
> utility that B could use, such that the users of site B could give
> sites like A permission to publish documents automatically. At a
> protocol level, I would expect this to use AtomPub but it could also
> be WebDAV or another mechanism.
>
> But how to get all those sites to implement such a thing? Well
> firstly, this isn't limited to FOAF. Or to any flavour of RDF. I think
> there is a strong story for why this will happen eventually. Strong
> because there are clear benefits for many of the actors:
>
> * a data-portability and user control story: I don't want all my music
> profile info to be on last.fm; I want last.fm to maintain
> http://danbri.org/music for me.
> * a benefits-the-data source story: I'm sure the marketing teams of
> various startups would be very happy at the ability to directly push
> content into 1000s of end-user sites. For the Google/Link karma,
> traffic etc.
> * benefits the hosts story: rather than having users share their FTP
> passwords, they share task-specific tokens that can be managed and
> rolled back on finer-grained basis
>
> So a sample flow might be:
>
> 1. User Alice is logged into her blog, which is now AtomPub+OAuth
> enabled.
> 2. She clicks on a link somewhere for "generate a FOAF file from your
> music interests", which takes her to a site that asks some basic
> information (name, homepage) and about some music-related sites she uses.
> 3. That site's FOAF generator site scans her public last.fm profile
> (after asking her username), and then does the same for her Myspace
> and YouTube profiles.
> 4. It then says "OK, generated music profile! May we publish this to
> your site? It then scans her homesite, blog etc via some
> auto-discovery protocol(s), to see which of them have a writable
> AtomPub + OAuth endpoint. It finds her wordpress blog supports this.
> 5. Alice is bounced to an OAuth permissioning page on her blog, which
> says something like:
>     "The Music Profile site at example.com  would like to
>     have read and write permission for an area of your site:
> once/always/never or for 6 months?"
> 6. Alice gives permission for 6 months. Some computer stuff happens in
> the background, and the Music site is given a token it can use to post
> data to Alice's site.
> 7. http://alice.example.com/blog/musicprofile then becomes a page (or
> mini-blog or activity stream) maintained entirely, or partially, by
> the remote site using RDFa markup sent as AtomPub blog entries, or
> maybe as AtomPub attachments.
>
> OK I'm glossing over some details here, such as configuration, choice
> of URIs etc. I may be over-simplifying some OAuth aspects, and
> forgetting detail of what's possible. But I think there is real
> potential in this sort of model, and would like a sanity check on that!
>
> Also the detail of whether different sites could/would write to the
> same space or feed or not. And how we can use this as a
> page-publishing model instead of a blog entry publishing model.
>
> I've written about this before, see
> http://markmail.org/message/gplslpe2k2zjuliq
>
> Re prototyping ...
>
> There is some wordpress+atompub code around, see
> http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:KcriYA9UohcJ:singpolyma.net/2008/05/atompub-oauth-for-wordpress/+wordpress+oauth&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a 
>
>
> Also I just found
> http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/oauth_for_roller
>
> And in http://danbri.org/words/2008/10/15/380 there is a point to some
> Google announcements from last year.
>
>
> I hope someone on these lists will find the OAuth/AtomPub combination
> interesting enough to explore (and report back on). I've also Cc:'d
> Norm Walsh here who knows AtomPub inside out now.
>
> Is this making sense to anyone but me? :)
>

Dan,

It has always made sense to me. I call what you describe a Data Space
(others also use the term: Dataspace) :-)

A Data Space is limited to one activity of the artifacts resulting from
said activity.  You should be able to put Blogs, Wikiwords, Photos,
Feeds, Calendars, Address-Books etc. in to a Data Space. You should also
be able generate conversation around any item of data that exists in a
Data Space (multi-dimensional objects of sociality etc..).

A Data Space would support a plethora of protocols (including OAuth,
FOAF+SSL, OpenID, AtomPub, and others).

OpenLink Data Spaces [1]  has always been about all of the above and
some :-)

Links:

1. http://tr.im/pQuJ - An old ODS presentation (Slidy + RDFa based)
2. http://ods.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/ODS - Home Page
3. http://ods.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/ODS/VirtOAuthControllers 
- OAuth support in ODS


Kingsley
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>


--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[melvincarvalho]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Martin Hepp
(UniBW)<martin.hepp@...> wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata for their
> businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1],
> I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of using
> .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic Web
> technology.
>
> Just some data:
> - We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people spend
> 10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of themselves.
> - Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 % of
> them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root directory.
> - Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation
> properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe.
>
> The effects are
> - URIs that are not dereferencable,
> - incorrect media types and
> and other problems.
>
> When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we encountered a
> variety of configurations and causes that we did not expect. It turned out
> that helping people just managing this tiny step of publishing  Semantic Web
> data would turn into a full-time job for 1 - 2 administrators.
>
> Typical causes of problems are
> - Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give limited
> or no access to .htaccess)
> - Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it begins
> with a dot
> - Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes
> - Many users have access just at a CMS level
>
> Bottomline:
> - For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an Apache
> server so that it serves RDF content according to current best practices.
> - For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a prohibitively
> difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a variety in the
> technical environments that turns into an engineering challenge what is easy
> on the textbook-level.
>
> As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates "dummy" RDFa
> code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data without interfering
> with the presentation layer.
> That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any XHTML
> document.
>
> Any opinions?

Been thinking about this issue for the last 6 months, and ive changed
my mind a few times.

Inclined to agree that RDFa is probably the ideal entry point for
bringing existing businesses onto Good Relations.

For a read/write web (which is the goal of commerce, right?), you're
probably back to .htaccess, though, with, say, a controller that will
manage POSTed SPARUL inserts.

I think taking it "one step at a time", in this way, seems a sensible
approach, though as a community, we'll need to put a bit of wieght
behind getting the RDFa tool set up to the state of the art.

>
> Best
> Martin
>
> [1]  http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>> Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill.
>>
>> Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format
>> you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the
>> single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the
>> alternate representations for conneg.
>>
>> As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for
>> RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good choice
>> for typical Web applications.
>>
>> As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly,
>> though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present.
>> Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the
>> surface area of the data.
>>
>> But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish data
>> directly without needing the human element to interpret it.
>>
>> I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few years
>> before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real
>> benefit for the end user.
>>
>> my 2 cents.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Danny.
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  mhepp@...
> phone:   [phone]
> fax:     [phone]
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>        http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp twitter: mfhepp
>
> Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
> ========================================================================
>
> Webcast:
> http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>
> Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based
> E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
> http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
>
> Tool for registering your business:
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Overview article on Semantic Universe:
> http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
>
> Project page and resources for developers:
> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>
> Tutorial materials:
> Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on
> Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
>
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
>
>
>
>
>

[Martin Hepp (UniBW)]

Hi Toby,

Toby A Inkster wrote:

> On 25 Jun 2009, at 21:18, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>> If [RDF] requires people to tinker with files with names starting
>> with a dot [...] then the entire SWeb architecture is fundamentally
>> broken.
>
> RDF doesn't. Apache does.
>
> Many hosts do have front ends for configuring Apache, allowing
> redirects to be set up and content-types configured by filling in
> simple web forms. But there are such a variety of these tools with
> different capabilities and different interfaces that it would be
> difficult to produce advice suitable for them all, so instead
> ".htaccess" recipes are provided instead.
>
> That said, there are a couple of steps that Martin could remove from
> his recipe and still be promoting reasonably good practice:
>
> Step 5a - this rewrites <http://example.org/semanticweb> to
> <http://example.org/semanticweb.rdf>. Other than aesthetics, there's
> no real reason to do this. Yes, I've read timbl's old Cool URIs
> document, and understand about not wanting to include hints of file
> format in a URI. But realistically, this file is going to always
> include some RDF - perhaps in a non-RDF/XML serialisation, but I don't
> see anything inappropriate about serving other RDF serialisations
> using a ".rdf" URL, provided the correct MIME type is used.
>

Yes - while it breaks my heart, we will uses URIs including the .rdf

extension in the future. Comparing benefits and trouble caused, it is
not worth pushing it.
> Step 5b - the default Apache mime.types file knows about
> application/rdf+xml, so this should be unnecessary. Perhaps instead
> have a GoodRelations "validator" which checks that the content type is
> correct, and only suggests this when it is found to be otherwise.
Well, our experience is that about 30% of the servers don't use the
proper mime type by default, which causes trouble with many semweb
applications

>
> Steps 3 and 4 could be amalgamated into a single "validate your RDF
> file" step using the aforementioned validator. The validator would be
> written so that, upon a successful validation, it offers single-click
> options to ping semweb search engines, and Yahoo (via a
> RDF/XML->DataRSS converter).
>
> With those adjustments, the recipe would just be:
>
>     1. Upload your RDF file.
>     2. Add a rel="meta" link to it.
>     3. Validate using our helpful tool.
>

Yes, that would be a good option. But actually I am prone to go for a

more radical shift, which is offering just three alternative publication
mechanisms:

a) download RDF/XML or N3 file (for expert users)
b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content (i.e.
such that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation
level" part of the Web page.
c) have us publish it on our servers (this will require some techniques
of validating users, update / refresh - requires some more thoughts.

Best

Martin

--
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  mhepp@...
phone:   [phone]
fax:     [phone]
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp

Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
========================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Tool for registering your business:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page and resources for developers:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Tutorial materials:
Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009





[martin_hepp.vcf]

---

begin:vcard
fn:Martin Hepp
n:Hepp;Martin
org:Bundeswehr University Munich;E-Business and Web Science Research Group
adr:;;Werner-Heisenberg-Web 39;Neubiberg;;D-85577;Germany
email;internet:mhepp@...
tel;work:[phone]
tel;pager:skype: mfhepp
url:http://www.heppnetz.de
version:2.1
end:vcard

---

[Pat Hayes]

On Jun 26, 2009, at 3:03 AM, Toby A Inkster wrote:

> On 25 Jun 2009, at 21:18, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>> If [RDF] requires people to tinker with files with names starting  
>> with a dot [...] then the entire SWeb architecture is fundamentally  
>> broken.
>
> RDF doesn't. Apache does.

I should have said, if the process of getting RDF published requires  
people...

Pat

>
> Many hosts do have front ends for configuring Apache, allowing  
> redirects to be set up and content-types configured by filling in  
> simple web forms. But there are such a variety of these tools with  
> different capabilities and different interfaces that it would be  
> difficult to produce advice suitable for them all, so instead  
> ".htaccess" recipes are provided instead.
>
> That said, there are a couple of steps that Martin could remove from  
> his recipe and still be promoting reasonably good practice:
>
> Step 5a - this rewrites <http://example.org/semanticweb> to <http://example.org/semanticweb.rdf 
> >. Other than aesthetics, there's no real reason to do this. Yes,  
> I've read timbl's old Cool URIs document, and understand about not  
> wanting to include hints of file format in a URI. But realistically,  
> this file is going to always include some RDF - perhaps in a non-RDF/
> XML serialisation, but I don't see anything inappropriate about  
> serving other RDF serialisations using a ".rdf" URL, provided the  
> correct MIME type is used.
>
> Step 5b - the default Apache mime.types file knows about application/
> rdf+xml, so this should be unnecessary. Perhaps instead have a  
> GoodRelations "validator" which checks that the content type is  
> correct, and only suggests this when it is found to be otherwise.
>
> Steps 3 and 4 could be amalgamated into a single "validate your RDF  
> file" step using the aforementioned validator. The validator would  
> be written so that, upon a successful validation, it offers single-
> click options to ping semweb search engines, and Yahoo (via a RDF/
> XML->DataRSS converter).
>
> With those adjustments, the recipe would just be:
>
> 1. Upload your RDF file.
> 2. Add a rel="meta" link to it.
> 3. Validate using our helpful tool.
>
> --
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@...>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
>
>
>
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC                                     [phone] or [phone]
40 South Alcaniz St.           [phone]   office
Pensacola                            [phone]   fax
FL 32502                              [phone]   mobile
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us       http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes

[kidehen]

Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Martin Hepp
> (UniBW)<martin.hepp@...> wrote:
>  
>> Hi all:
>>
>> After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata for their
>> businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1],
>> I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of using
>> .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic Web
>> technology.
>>
>> Just some data:
>> - We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people spend
>> 10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of themselves.
>> - Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 % of
>> them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root directory.
>> - Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation
>> properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe.
>>
>> The effects are
>> - URIs that are not dereferencable,
>> - incorrect media types and
>> and other problems.
>>
>> When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we encountered a
>> variety of configurations and causes that we did not expect. It turned out
>> that helping people just managing this tiny step of publishing  Semantic Web
>> data would turn into a full-time job for 1 - 2 administrators.
>>
>> Typical causes of problems are
>> - Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give limited
>> or no access to .htaccess)
>> - Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it begins
>> with a dot
>> - Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes
>> - Many users have access just at a CMS level
>>
>> Bottomline:
>> - For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an Apache
>> server so that it serves RDF content according to current best practices.
>> - For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a prohibitively
>> difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a variety in the
>> technical environments that turns into an engineering challenge what is easy
>> on the textbook-level.
>>
>> As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates "dummy" RDFa
>> code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data without interfering
>> with the presentation layer.
>> That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any XHTML
>> document.
>>
>> Any opinions?
>>    
>
> Been thinking about this issue for the last 6 months, and ive changed
> my mind a few times.
>
> Inclined to agree that RDFa is probably the ideal entry point for
> bringing existing businesses onto Good Relations.
>
> For a read/write web (which is the goal of commerce, right?), you're
> probably back to .htaccess, though, with, say, a controller that will
> manage POSTed SPARUL inserts.
>
> I think taking it "one step at a time", in this way, seems a sensible
> approach, though as a community, we'll need to put a bit of wieght
> behind getting the RDFa tool set up to the state of the art.
>  

.htaccess is a sad and unnecessary technical detail that assumes we have
an Apache mono-culture, and that said mono-culture is immutable.

For GoodRelations based product, services, and offerings descriptions,
the workflow should be as follows:

1. Describe you products and services using terms from GR (ontology
bound annotators help here irrespective of source and location);
2. Get an HTML as output from #1 (with embedded RDFa for the product and
services description data);
3. Optionally, publish doc from #2 to your public Web Server;
4. Optionally, notify the broader Web via pinger services (PTSW,
Sindice, etc..).

If you couldn't publish docs to your Web Server before you encountered
GoodRelations, RDFa, and Linked Data, then we are dealing with a totally
different matter, one that isn't specific to Linked Data deployment.

Martin:
I think having a third party relay inaccurate opening and closing hours
is a feature re. the GoodRelations, RDFa, Linked Data, and pinger
services combo; it makes the "opportunity cost" of not putting the RDFa
embellished HTML doc  (from #3) on the server, palpable :-)  Thus,  we
end up with a closed loop, that simply lets the Web do the REST
(including social and political cajoling re. doc publishing).



Kingsley

>  
>> Best
>> Martin
>>
>> [1]  http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>>
>> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>    
>>> Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill.
>>>
>>> Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format
>>> you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the
>>> single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the
>>> alternate representations for conneg.
>>>
>>> As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for
>>> RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good choice
>>> for typical Web applications.
>>>
>>> As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly,
>>> though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present.
>>> Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the
>>> surface area of the data.
>>>
>>> But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish data
>>> directly without needing the human element to interpret it.
>>>
>>> I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few years
>>> before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real
>>> benefit for the end user.
>>>
>>> my 2 cents.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Danny.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>> --
>> --------------------------------------------------------------
>> martin hepp
>> e-business & web science research group
>> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>>
>> e-mail:  mhepp@...
>> phone:   [phone]
>> fax:     [phone]
>> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>>        http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
>> skype:   mfhepp twitter: mfhepp
>>
>> Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
>> ========================================================================
>>
>> Webcast:
>> http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>>
>> Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based
>> E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
>> http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
>>
>> Tool for registering your business:
>> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>>
>> Overview article on Semantic Universe:
>> http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
>>
>> Project page and resources for developers:
>> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>>
>> Tutorial materials:
>> Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on
>> Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
>>
>> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>    
>
>
>  

--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[Mark Birbeck-4]

Hi Martin,

> b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content (i.e. such
> that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation level" part
> of the Web page.

By coincidence, I just read this:

  Hidden div's -- don't do it!
  It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet
  in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block
  of text using CSS or other techniques. Don't do this! Mark up the
  content where it already exists. Google will not show content from
  hidden div's in Rich Snippets, and worse, this can be considered
  cloaking by Google's spam detection systems. [1]

Regards,

Mark

[1] <http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-snippets/32la2chf8l79m/1#>

--
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@...

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)

[Martin Hepp (UniBW)]

Kingsley:
So basically you think that RDF hosting will ne a new market segment
with services like small RDF hosting services (same as private Web space
packages), free hosting (maybe with ads included in the RDF), etc.?
Martin


Kingsley Idehen wrote:
 >Martin:
 >I think having a third party relay inaccurate opening and closing
hours is a feature re. the GoodRelations, RDFa, Linked Data, and pinger
services combo; it makes the "opportunity cost" of not putting the >RDFa
embellished HTML doc  (from #3) on the server, palpable :-)  Thus,  we
end up with a closed loop, that simply lets the Web do the REST
(including social and political cajoling re. doc publishing).

--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  mhepp@...
phone:   [phone]
fax:     [phone]
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp

Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
========================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Tool for registering your business:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page and resources for developers:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Tutorial materials:
Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009





[martin_hepp.vcf]

---

begin:vcard
fn:Martin Hepp
n:Hepp;Martin
org:Bundeswehr University Munich;E-Business and Web Science Research Group
adr:;;Werner-Heisenberg-Web 39;Neubiberg;;D-85577;Germany
email;internet:mhepp@...
tel;work:[phone]
tel;pager:skype: mfhepp
url:http://www.heppnetz.de
version:2.1
end:vcard

---

[kidehen]

Mark Birbeck wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
>  
>> b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content (i.e. such
>> that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation level" part
>> of the Web page.
>>    
>
> By coincidence, I just read this:
>
>   Hidden div's -- don't do it!
>   It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet
>   in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block
>   of text using CSS or other techniques. Don't do this! Mark up the
>   content where it already exists. Google will not show content from
>   hidden div's in Rich Snippets, and worse, this can be considered
>   cloaking by Google's spam detection systems. [1]
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
> [1] <http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-snippets/32la2chf8l79m/1#>
>
>  

Martin/Mark,

Time to make a sample RDFa doc that includes very detailed GR based
metadata.

Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I
really think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..
 

--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[Bradley Allen-2]

Kingsley-

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@...> wrote:
> Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I really think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..

The correct question to ask, and the one that I believe Mark is
addressing, is should we be asking people to describe their content in
a way that may be at cross-purposes to their efforts to monetize it?

Bradley P. Allen
http://bradleypallen.org
[phone]

[kidehen]

Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:
> Kingsley:
> So basically you think that RDF hosting will ne a new market segment
> with services like small RDF hosting services (same as private Web
> space packages), free hosting (maybe with ads included in the RDF), etc.?
Absolutely!!

There's nothing like overtly or covertly unveiling "opportunity cost"
palpability, when trying to unveil the virtues of any concept, to people
charged with running a business :-)

This is the very thinking behind the "owl:shameAs" scheme we use in the
Linked Data compliant proxy URIs generated by our Sponger's  RDFizer
cartridges i.e., show people the impressions they are missing out on by
providing them with a hint URI, that exposes a suggested data slot,
within their respective data spaces.


Kingsley

> Martin
>
>
> Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> >Martin:
> >I think having a third party relay inaccurate opening and closing
> hours is a feature re. the GoodRelations, RDFa, Linked Data, and
> pinger services combo; it makes the "opportunity cost" of not putting
> the >RDFa embellished HTML doc  (from #3) on the server, palpable :-)  
> Thus,  we end up with a closed loop, that simply lets the Web do the
> REST (including social and political cajoling re. doc publishing).
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  mhepp@...
> phone:   [phone]
> fax:     [phone]
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp twitter: mfhepp
>
> Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
> ========================================================================
>
> Webcast:
> http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>
> Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based
> E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
> http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
>
> Tool for registering your business:
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Overview article on Semantic Universe:
> http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
>
> Project page and resources for developers:
> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>
> Tutorial materials:
> Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A
> Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo!
> SearchMonkey
>
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
>
>
>
>

--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[kidehen]

Bradley Allen wrote:

> Kingsley-
>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@...> wrote:
>  
>> Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I really think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..
>>    
>
> The correct question to ask, and the one that I believe Mark is
> addressing, is should we be asking people to describe their content in
> a way that may be at cross-purposes to their efforts to monetize it?
>
> Bradley P. Allen
> http://bradleypallen.org
> [phone]
>
>  

Bradley,

Who is the monetizer? And what is being monetized?

I think people should simply describe themselves, their wants, their
friends, their offerrings etc. as clearly as possible. The Web will take
care of the REST, not joking :-)

Links:

1.
http://www.seangolliher.com/2009/linked-data/serendipitous-discovery-quotient-sdq-the-future-of-seo-or-an-abstract-concept 
- SDQ vs SEO .

--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[Martin Hepp (UniBW)]

So if this "hidden div / span" approach is not feasible, we got a problem.

The reason is that, as beautiful the idea is of using RDFa to make a)
the human-readable presentation and b) the machine-readable meta-data
link to the same literals, the problematic is it in reality once the
structure of a) and b) are very different.

For very simple property-value pairs, embedding RDFa markup is no
problem. But if you have a bit more complexity at the conceptual level
and in particular if there are significant differences to the structure
of the presentation (e.g. in terms of granularity, ordering of elements,
etc.), it gets very, very messy and hard to maintain.

And you give up the clear separation of concerns between the conceptual
level and the presentation level that XML brought about.

Maybe one should tell Google that this is not cloaking if SW meta-data
is embedded...

But the snippet basically indicates that we should not recommend this
practice.

Martin


Kingsley Idehen wrote:

> Mark Birbeck wrote:
>> Hi Martin,
>>
>>  
>>> b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content
>>> (i.e. such
>>> that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation
>>> level" part
>>> of the Web page.
>>>    
>>
>> By coincidence, I just read this:
>>
>>   Hidden div's -- don't do it!
>>   It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet
>>   in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block
>>   of text using CSS or other techniques. Don't do this! Mark up the
>>   content where it already exists. Google will not show content from
>>   hidden div's in Rich Snippets, and worse, this can be considered
>>   cloaking by Google's spam detection systems. [1]
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> [1]
>> <http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-snippets/32la2chf8l79m/1#>
>>
>>
>>  
> Martin/Mark,
>
> Time to make a sample RDFa doc that includes very detailed GR based
> metadata.
>
> Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I
> really think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..
>
>

--
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  mhepp@...
phone:   [phone]
fax:     [phone]
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp

Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
========================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Tool for registering your business:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page and resources for developers:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Tutorial materials:
Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009





[martin_hepp.vcf]

---

begin:vcard
fn:Martin Hepp
n:Hepp;Martin
org:Bundeswehr University Munich;E-Business and Web Science Research Group
adr:;;Werner-Heisenberg-Web 39;Neubiberg;;D-85577;Germany
email;internet:mhepp@...
tel;work:[phone]
tel;pager:skype: mfhepp
url:http://www.heppnetz.de
version:2.1
end:vcard

---

[melvincarvalho]

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Martin Hepp
(UniBW)<martin.hepp@...> wrote:

> So if this "hidden div / span" approach is not feasible, we got a problem.
>
> The reason is that, as beautiful the idea is of using RDFa to make a) the
> human-readable presentation and b) the machine-readable meta-data link to
> the same literals, the problematic is it in reality once the structure of a)
> and b) are very different.
>
> For very simple property-value pairs, embedding RDFa markup is no problem.
> But if you have a bit more complexity at the conceptual level and in
> particular if there are significant differences to the structure of the
> presentation (e.g. in terms of granularity, ordering of elements, etc.), it
> gets very, very messy and hard to maintain.
>
> And you give up the clear separation of concerns between the conceptual
> level and the presentation level that XML brought about.
>
> Maybe one should tell Google that this is not cloaking if SW meta-data is
> embedded...
>
> But the snippet basically indicates that we should not recommend this
> practice.

What happens if you put them in one big <span> tree and use the
@content attribute?

>
> Martin
>
>
> Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>>
>> Mark Birbeck wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Martin,
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content (i.e.
>>>> such
>>>> that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation level"
>>>> part
>>>> of the Web page.
>>>>
>>>
>>> By coincidence, I just read this:
>>>
>>>  Hidden div's -- don't do it!
>>>  It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet
>>>  in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block
>>>  of text using CSS or other techniques. Don't do this! Mark up the
>>>  content where it already exists. Google will not show content from
>>>  hidden div's in Rich Snippets, and worse, this can be considered
>>>  cloaking by Google's spam detection systems. [1]
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> <http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-snippets/32la2chf8l79m/1#>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Martin/Mark,
>>
>> Time to make a sample RDFa doc that includes very detailed GR based
>> metadata.
>>
>> Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I really
>> think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..
>>
>>
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  mhepp@...
> phone:   [phone]
> fax:     [phone]
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>        http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp twitter: mfhepp
>
> Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
> ========================================================================
>
> Webcast:
> http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>
> Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based
> E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
> http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
>
> Tool for registering your business:
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Overview article on Semantic Universe:
> http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
>
> Project page and resources for developers:
> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>
> Tutorial materials:
> Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on
> Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
>
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
>
>
>
>
>

[kidehen]

Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:

> So if this "hidden div / span" approach is not feasible, we got a
> problem.
>
> The reason is that, as beautiful the idea is of using RDFa to make a)
> the human-readable presentation and b) the machine-readable meta-data
> link to the same literals, the problematic is it in reality once the
> structure of a) and b) are very different.
>
> For very simple property-value pairs, embedding RDFa markup is no
> problem. But if you have a bit more complexity at the conceptual level
> and in particular if there are significant differences to the
> structure of the presentation (e.g. in terms of granularity, ordering
> of elements, etc.), it gets very, very messy and hard to maintain.
>
> And you give up the clear separation of concerns between the
> conceptual level and the presentation level that XML brought about.
>
> Maybe one should tell Google that this is not cloaking if SW meta-data
> is embedded...

Yes.

Ideally, they should figure that out from the self-describing nature of
the RDF based metadata exposed by the embedded RDFa -- assuming they are
doing real RDFa processing :-)


Kingsley
>
> But the snippet basically indicates that we should not recommend this
> practice.

>
> Martin
>
>
> Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> Mark Birbeck wrote:
>>> Hi Martin,
>>>
>>>  
>>>> b) download RDFa snippet that just represents the RDF/XML content
>>>> (i.e. such
>>>> that it does not have to be consolidated with the "presentation
>>>> level" part
>>>> of the Web page.
>>>>    
>>>
>>> By coincidence, I just read this:
>>>
>>>   Hidden div's -- don't do it!
>>>   It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet
>>>   in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block
>>>   of text using CSS or other techniques. Don't do this! Mark up the
>>>   content where it already exists. Google will not show content from
>>>   hidden div's in Rich Snippets, and worse, this can be considered
>>>   cloaking by Google's spam detection systems. [1]
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> <http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets/google-rich-snippets/32la2chf8l79m/1#>
>>>
>>>
>>>  
>> Martin/Mark,
>>
>> Time to make a sample RDFa doc that includes very detailed GR based
>> metadata.
>>
>> Mark: Should we be describing our docs for Google, fundamentally? I
>> really think Google should actually recalibrate back to the Web etc..
>>
>>
>

--


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

[Toby Inkster-4]

On 27 Jun 2009, at 11:25, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> What happens if you put them in one big <span> tree and use the
> @content attribute?

view-source:http://ontologi.es/rail/routes/gb/VTB1.xhtml

--
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@...>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

[Tom Heath]

Hi Richard,

2009/6/25 Richard Cyganiak <richard@...>:

<snip/>

> (On the value of content negotiation in general: I think the key point is
> that any linked data URI intended for re-use, when put into a browser by the
> average person interested in linked data publishing, MUST return something
> human-readable. That's a hard requirement, otherwise people will never be
> confident about what a particular URI means and hence they won't re-use.
> That was the thinking behind the Cool URIs note when Leo and I wrote it a
> few years ago. In the past, the only way to get that effect was with content
> negotiation, so even though content negotiation is a pain, it's what we had
> to do. In the present, we have an alternative thanks to RDFa.

Not disagreeing at all about the human readable requirement, but just
a question... in this scenario you describe, is there not a risk that
Joe User will enter that URI and come to the conclusion that it
identifies the document (or section thereof), rather than a thing
described in the document?

Interested in your thoughts :)

Tom.

[Tom Heath]

Martin,

2009/6/27 Martin Hepp (UniBW) <martin.hepp@...>:

> So if this "hidden div / span" approach is not feasible, we got a problem.
>
> The reason is that, as beautiful the idea is of using RDFa to make a) the
> human-readable presentation and b) the machine-readable meta-data link to
> the same literals, the problematic is it in reality once the structure of a)
> and b) are very different.
>
> For very simple property-value pairs, embedding RDFa markup is no problem.
> But if you have a bit more complexity at the conceptual level and in
> particular if there are significant differences to the structure of the
> presentation (e.g. in terms of granularity, ordering of elements, etc.), it
> gets very, very messy and hard to maintain.

Amen. Thank you for writing this. I completely agree. RDFa has some
great use cases but (like any technology) has its limitations. Let's
not oversell it.

Tom.

[Tom Heath]

Hi Pat,

2009/6/25 Pat Hayes <phayes@...>:
> With the sincerest respect, Tom, your attitude here is part of the problem.
> Maybe, along with many other people, I am indeed still stuck in the
> mid-1990s. You have permission to be as condescending as you like. But
> still, here I am, stuck. Thoroughly stuck. So no amount of condescending
> "sooo-20th-century, my dear" chatter is going to actually enable me to get
> to a place where I can do what you think I should be doing.

Condescension was never my intention here. My goal was to draw a
comparison that might enable us to learn a lesson from the history of
the Web and use that to help us move forward. As Mark described, over
the course of time more and more tools became available that made it
easier to publish HTML. Presumably these only arose because publishing
HTML was to some degree hard. The Web community has gone through this
process once already; let's learn the lessons from last time and apply
them to publishing RDF so people don't have to be stuck any more. Dan
outlined some technical approaches to doing this sort of thing. Some
domain-specific apps already exist that (hopefully) reduce the pain;
it was one of the goals of Revyu.com for example.

> I cannot use a
> rewrite rule to catch incoming requests, or do whatever you are talking
> about here. I live in an environment where I simply do not have access at
> all to the workings of my server at a level that close to the metal, because
> it is already woven into a clever maze of PHP machinery which is too fragile
> to allow erks like me to mess with it. Some of the best W3C techies have
> taken a look, and they can't find a way through it, either. Maybe Im in a
> special position, but I bet a whole lot of people, especially in the
> corporate world, are in a similar bind.

You're talking about two very different groups here. If the right
tools are created then individuals will presumably adopt some
specialised SaaS analogous to say wordpress.com. Corporations are a
different kettle of fish, but just as many built their own Web-serving
infrastructure in the 90s, so they will invest in publishing data to
the Semantic Web if they perceive adequate value (demonstrating that
value is where we need to be working even harder!).

> System level access to a server is
> quite a different beast than being allowed to publish HTML on a website
> somewhere. I can, and do, publish HTML, or indeed just about any file I
> like, but I don't get to insert code. So 6 lines or 600, it makes no
> difference.
>
> But in any case, this is ridiculous. RDF is just XML text, for goodness
> sake.  I need to insert lines of code into a server file,  and write PHP
> scripts, in order to publish some RDF or HTML?  That is insane. It would
> have been insane in the mid-1990s and its even more insane now.

No. This is incorrect. This discussion only applies to the
303-redirect/slash URI pattern. You can avoid this completely by using
the hash URI pattern as someone mentioned (sorry for not crediting
directly, getting hard to navigate this thread).

> IMO, it is
> you (and Tim and the rest of the W3C) who are stuck in the past here.  Most
> Web users do not, and will not, write code. They will be publishing content
> in a cloud somewhere, even further away from the gritty world of scripts and
> lines of code than people - most people - are now. Most actual content
> providers are never going to want to even know that PHP scripts exist, let
> alone be obliged to write or copy one.

You've over-interpreted my words here. See above.

> Martin is exactly right: this is a
> MAJOR bottleneck to SWeb adoption. Its up to the people in the TAG to listen
> to this fact and do something about it, not to keep issuing useless  'best
> practice' advice that cannot be followed by 99% of the world.

I think that's overplaying things. It's like saying "stop issuing best
practices for cardiac surgeons because Average Joe can't use those to
help improve his cardiac health".

> RDF should be text, in documents. One should be able to use it without
> knowing about anything more than the RDF spec and the XML spec. If it
> requires people to tinker with files with names starting with a dot, or
> write code, or deploy scripts, then the entire SWeb architecture is
> fundamentally broken.

The architecture of the Semantic Web is the architecture of Web. And
just as in the Web we have varied publishing patterns/workflows
(ranging from simple to hard), so we will in the Semantic Web.

Cheers,

Tom.

[Tim Berners-Lee]

On 2009-06 -25, at 13:29, Pat Hayes wrote:

>
> On Jun 25, 2009, at 11:44 AM, Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:
>
>> Hi all:
>>
>> After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata  
>> for their businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1],
>> I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of  
>> using .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic  
>> Web technology.
>
> I agree, and raised this issue with the W3C TAG some time ago. It  
> was apparently not taken seriously. The general consensus seemed to  
> be that any normal adult should be competent to manipulate an Apache  
> server.

(Was yours a deliberate sarcastic misrepresentation of the TAG's  
consensus, or a genuine misunderstanding?)   The TAG has expressed  
that the fact that Apache needs root intervention when it doesn't have  
the right mime type set up is a serious bug.

> My own company, however, refuses to allow its employees to have  
> access to .htaccess files, and I am therefore quite unable to  
> conform to the current best practice from my own work situation. I  
> believe that this situation is not uncommon.

So you mean you can't set up content negotiation and redirection.
But you can use foo#bar URIs like I do.

Will the company allow a mime.types file to include application/rdf+xml?

Tim

[kidehen]

On 6/28/09 6:33 PM, "Tom Heath" <tom.heath@...> wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> 2009/6/25 Richard Cyganiak <richard@...>:
>
> <snip/>
>
>> (On the value of content negotiation in general: I think the key point is
>> that any linked data URI intended for re-use, when put into a browser by the
>> average person interested in linked data publishing, MUST return something
>> human-readable. That's a hard requirement, otherwise people will never be
>> confident about what a particular URI means and hence they won't re-use.
>> That was the thinking behind the Cool URIs note when Leo and I wrote it a
>> few years ago. In the past, the only way to get that effect was with content
>> negotiation, so even though content negotiation is a pain, it's what we had
>> to do. In the present, we have an alternative thanks to RDFa.
>
> Not disagreeing at all about the human readable requirement, but just
> a question... in this scenario you describe, is there not a risk that
> Joe User will enter that URI and come to the conclusion that it
> identifies the document (or section thereof), rather than a thing
> described in the document?
>
> Interested in your thoughts :)
>
> Tom.
>

Tom,

Of course not, if dealing with an HTTP URI deployed in line with the Linked
Data meme's deployment guidelines. In short, the user will encounter a
document describing the Thing identified by the URI.

The issue is not the document, but what it represents (metadata) and how it
comes to be associated (implicitly) with the entity (resource) it describes
via the entities URI.

When all is said and done, the Linked Data meme has simply used HTTP to fix
an age old problem: implicit association of an Entity with its Metadata
within the context of distributed computing without any platform lock-in.

Rewind back to pre. Web, then ask yourself: how did programmers refer to
data objects and de-reference their representations (typically a proprietary
language and platform specific data structure).

Again, Linked Data is just about making what was platform specific, platform
independent, via HTTP i.e., "data access by reference" and "data
manipulation by values exposed by de-dereferenced data structures".

We really need to keep this quite simple. There are zillions of people that
understand "data access by reference" etc.. They also understand Metadata
etc.. What they don't understand is how we sometimes *inadvertently* make
this whole Linekd Data meme thing complex by not connecting the meme to what
existed before the Web (which was actually created on a computer that
already had a fully functional distributed object based OS etc..).



Kingsley