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_.

XML.com: What Is RDF has been updated for Summer 2006. The last update was back in 2001.

Grand Text Auto » Google’s Norvig Questions Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web closes its post with this excellent quote:

Although Berners-Lee closed by encouraging everyone to contribute data that they had in RDF to the Semantic Web, here I am typing up a blog post instead

Use DARQ to query the entire web as a single large database. It’s federated SPARQL querying.

I will be presenting a quick 30 minute talk on RDF and Oracle 10g to the Hawaii Oracle Users Group Tuesday May 9th at 11:30am HST. The meeting’s agenda is now available, including directions to the location. There’s even a drawing for the Effective Oracle by Design book!

I plan to give an overview of RDF and then show how Oracle 10g implements it.

The word on parking is:

> Parking in lot #1 or #2 (enter one block mauka of Dillingham on Kokea Street, is OK. Tell the parking lot attendant they are attending a function in PCATT and put a handwritten note on the dashboard saying that also. Handicap parking should be available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Hope to see you there! Pizza will be served, so come on down.

Identity, Reference, and the Web (IRW2006) Workshop

> Our immediate goal for this workshop is to explore the nature of identification and reference on the Web, > building on current work in Web architecture, the Semantic Web, and informal community-based tagging > (folksonomy), as well as current practice in XML and theory in philosophy and linguistics.

I’ve been reading the PDFs and papers that will presented at this workshop, and I’m really gaining a greater understanding for the whole httpRange-14 problem. I’ve always known it’s a problem, but I’ve brushed it off hoping that it won’t affect me in Real Life.

However, as RDF is moving more and more into knowledge management arena (and I’m not sure it should go there anyway), the issues of identity are extremely important.

At this moment, I’m subscribing to the “It’s on the web if it has a URI. Who cares if I can’t actually retrieve a representation from the URI?” URI identify Resources, which as we all know are things that can be identified by a URI. A bit cyclic, to be sure. However, it’s broad enough (for me) to mean that anything can be given a URI. Things might be identified with multiple URIs, even.

Now, the larger issue of “How can we know anything about what a URI identifies?” comes into play. This is the reader vs writer issue, as we attempt to reconcile if the author of the URI is the one that can dictate what the URI identifies or if the consumer is able to assign meaning.

I believe that meaning is relative, and that the reader, with their unique experiences and perspectives, will always interpret things in their own way. The readers, or consumers, will always have more power with regards to information interpretation.

This is why I think it’s OK if <http://example.org/x14> identifies a Beach, a Park, a Seashore, and a Playground all at the same time. As long as when two people are communicating about <http://example.org/x14> they are able to agree that they agree that it identifies the same conceptual entity, it should be a short leap to also agree that a beach can be a park can be a seashore can be a playground.

Of course, the granularity of what one party may consider <http://example.org/x14> can be very different than another party. It’s at this point that if Party A wants to be _more specific_ in what it considers is identified by <http://example.org/x14>, it will need to either be OK with Party B’s more general interpretation, or will need to commence some sort of negotiation in order to agree.

For example, take this conversation:

A: “Where are you?”
B: “At kailua beach”

At this point, A should know what Kailua Beach is _in very general terms_. If A just was simply curious at a high level, this conversation is over. However, A might want to meet up with B, so A asks:

A: “Where at the beach are you?”
B: “Oh, to the left of the showers, next to the tree”

Now A should have a very good idea of where, in more exact terms, B is located.

In this example, B’s location is <http://example.org/x14> which can be interpreted many different ways (eg, “at the beach”, “at some lat and long”, “next to a tree”). The consumer of the information must make the determination if they have enough information to make a sound decision. This requires perspective (what other statements in my RDF graph do I have about the URI?) and can’t be provided or assumed by the publisher of the URI.

Hm, so what did I say in this post?

I believe URIs can identify things whether or not they have representations on the web.

I believe that they things URIs identify can be interpreted in many different ways. Using some owl:disjointWith can help to notice when two or more parties are in arguments.

I believe that interpretation is a local operation, performed by the reader or consumer of information.

It’s very possible that conversations between semantic web agents will be required to come to a sort of shared understanding.

TopBraid Composer is a:

> new modeling environment from industry experts for creating and managing Semantic Web ontologies.

From the people who brought you Protege OWL editor. Built on Eclipse.

IBM Web Ontology Manager has just been released.

> IBM Web Ontology Manager is a lightweight, Web-based tool for managing ontologies expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL). With this technology, users can browse, search, and submit ontologies to an ontology repository.