RDFa Basics

Great video! The first half is especially nice, bravo! Please consider using foaf:name instead of <foaf:name> in your N3 example. Don't you have a feeling that putting semantics into HTML is just as wrong, or maybe even worse than mixing style and structure?

Thanks for the foaf:name correction - I'll make sure to make the change it in future videos. As for the mixing semantics/syntax comment, I think practicality plays a large role in RDFa. There is benefit for keeping the machine readable and the human readable data in sync and in the same document, which is what both Microformats and RDFa does.

But in your example, the human-readable text "Jane is friends with Mac" is not in sync with the machine-readable data "#jane foaf:knows #mac". You can change the text and the data could stay. Do you call this "in sync"? Aren't you asking people to keep text and data "in sync"? Is there a way to generate the text "Jane is friends with Mac" from the data "#jane foaf:knows #mac". It's not obvious from your example.

I also don't think that having more triples will help computers to "understand" anything. More triples will only allow computers to do simple computations on data, but not more. This could be used by AI in the future, but by itself triples bring no understanding, IMO.

The point I was trying to make is that we have to lay the foundation first, which is exposing triples on web pages. Once those triples are there, there are many, many types of applications we can build based on that foundation. It is analogous to saying that the more people and pages there are on Wikipedia, the more useful that site becomes...

I think you can think of this as a way for an AI systems to assemble the data on the internet.

Yay, brilliant!

Thanks! Remember to tell your friends about the semantic web! :)

Very nice :) What's your next topic?

Thanks Dan :) The next production is probably going to be an advanced RDFa tutorial. Also wanted to do one on the Microformats approach. We'll be doing several on Bitmunk as well... If you've got any ideas/suggestions of what you'd like to see next, please let me know!