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 <pha...@ihmc.us
<mailto:pha...@ihmc.us>> 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: mh...@computer.org <mailto:mh...@computer.org>
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>
------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494
3973
40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office
Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax
FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
