Semergence

Danny is spot on with his thoughts on Steampunk Semantics in response to my earlier Is Usefulness Inversely Proportional to Specificity? post.

Also, he’s very right I conflated a few issues. To that I owe my 2 month old, who requires my Just In Time attention, and thus has me context switching faster than a single core CPU running a Java application.

I’d like to clarify and say that I feel that RDF the Syntax will fail. It’s not able to embedded into XHTML in a way that anyone knows about or cares about. Microformats have succeeded here, allowing me to *very easily* embed metadata into XHTML.

Can I generate the same graph of metadata with microformat serialization or RDF serialization? I believe I generally can (though some research here should prove this). And this fact that RDF is also a data model might well be its saving grace.

“But what if I’m not publishing XHTML? How do microformats help me publish metadata?” you say? To which I answer: “Use NTriples, Turtle, or even N3“. They are more widely used among humans than RDF/XML is these days, and are a de facto standard and option in the exchange of triples.

“But I love XML! I want RDF/XML!” you cry! To which I reply, Good luck trying to use RDF/XML serialization with your favorite XML tools. XSLT? Forget it. XQuery? Not on your life.

Let’s take what’s good about RDF (the triples, the simple graph model), toss what’s not working (the XML serialization, forcing the use of URIs), and publish how to represent microformats in the RDF data model.

Let RDF ride on microformats. Let microformats play in RDF world.

Thinking about microformats and RDF, I’m wondering how microformats might succeed where RDF hasn’t. To be clear, success to me is determined by penetration of the metadata format into run of the mill XHTML, and the ease at which someone can inject the metadata right into the XHTML document. In other words, success is awarded to the metadata format that has the lowest barrier of entry.

Will microformats succeed because they can and are so vague? Is RDF asking people to be too specific? Is the usefulness of a metadata markup format for the web inversely proportional to the specificity of the metadata itself?

Case in point. Go ahead and try to define what foaf#knows means. It certainly means something different from one person to another. The specification itself opens itself up to interpretation.

> knows - A person known by this person (indicating some level of reciprocated interaction between the parties).

and

> We take a broad view of ‘knows’

This vagueness is a strength of the FOAF specification. To constrain this definition would force the majority of users to spend time questioning if their particular relationship falls withing the confines of the definition, or they would simply ignore the definition and use the relationship anyway and thus polluting the metadata space.

Microformats seem to have the same broad usage allowances. They aren’t concerned with single URIs for referencing topics, nor are they concerned with defining the semantics of the microformat with some complex ontology language. Microformats are simple, and whose meanings are easily conveyed between humans. That’s right, I said humans.

A successful metadata format for the web must be easily understood by humans, even if it is to be useful for machines. RDF and OWL seem to have the machine in mind first. This is opposite of what makes the Web so successful and useful. OWL doesn’t appreciate vagueness, nor does it allow for expressing “sort of” and “almost” clarifications, both of which are vitally important if any true meaning is to be conveyed.

Microformats punt on this issue, and I give them credit. Just tell me the terms to use, and I’ll use them. Let us all share these simple terms. These terms’ meanings are vague to a computer, but clear enough to a human. And a human is the one that will program the logic to handle the terms, so “good enough” seems to be just fine here.

The Web is vague, and anyone can say anything about anything. While it’s true that RDF and OWL don’t prohibit this basic freedom, I haven’t seen how they help at all with sorting the wheat from the chaff. Microformats, on the other hand, don’t try to solve this problem either. But their baggage is minimal, easily embedded into XHTML, and otherwise easily understood and deployed by humans.

It’s a relief to hear that Mozilla will add direct support for Microformats into Firefox 3. Through Microformats, you can quite easily markup your XHTML with extra semantics. You can, for example, declare that a particular set of XHTML elements contains a person’s address.

Of course, by reading the web page, you’d be able to easily determine if that page contains an address. But can your browser? With direct support for Microformats, it will.

Once your browser understands that an address is present on the web page, you’ll be able to easily add it to your address book of choice.

Ah, the dream within a dream. This is data aware browsing, people. If you want Web 2.0 to mean anything other than marketing hype, this is what needs to happen.

Want to try this type of data integration out right now? Give Operator a shot. It extends Firefox 2 to be microformat aware, allowing you to do _actually useful things with microformats_.