05.31.05
Semantic Web: Heated Debate
Another provactive post on the value of the Semantic Web compared to the semantic web has spurred some more debate at Danny Ayer’s blog.
What’s clear from the discussion is that there’s still fairly serious disagreement about what the thrust of the Semantic Web is, as well as the practical limitations of its implementation via RDF/XML.
What I’d like to understand: what are the practical limitations of using MicroFormats? What do you lose by taking an approach that is based on MicroFormats instead of RDF? And if GRDDL provides a data migration path from MF to RDF, do those limitations really carry any weight?
brian said,
May 31, 2005 at 7:32 pm
There are Many limitations to Microformats. XMDP is currently the only way to describe a microformat. XMDP only describes the possible properties and values, it currently does nothing for enforcing data type, (things like DATE, INT, STRING) nor does it account for relationships like (TRANSITIVE, SYMMETRIC). It also fails to show a relationship between properties and values. For example, there is no way to enforce that a property MUST be a child of another. This is currently handled all in the descriptions and references to other documents. RDF and other technologies, XML Schema bridge those gaps, because microformats in their current form are ment to be human readable.
Information Overload » MicroFormats: What’s their problem? said,
June 3, 2005 at 12:10 pm
[…] 2005 to Microformats, Semantics
[Update 6/2/2005: Added tags] In response to my previous post, Brian Suda provided some valuable commentary on the lim […]