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

Juan Sequeda wrote:

So... then from what I understand.. why bother with content negotiation, right?

No, it means content negotiation is an option, albeit a tough one when ".htaccess" and Apache are ground zero.

Just do everything in RDFa, right?

Of course, if it works for your circumstances :-)

Basically, we need to tweak the Linked Data Best Practices guides and general messaging by adding  RDFa to the conversation -- as an *option* for Linked Data Deployment. I believe I expressed this sentiment a while back.

Kingsley

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?

Juan Sequeda, Ph.D Student
Dept. of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin

www.juansequeda.com <http://www.juansequeda.com>
www.semanticwebaustin.org <http://www.semanticwebaustin.org>

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@... <mailto:phayes@...>> 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. 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.

   Pat Hayes


       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?

       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@... <mailto:mhepp@...>

       phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
       fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
       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>


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Regards,

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