[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathre

• To: "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathreadthing)
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@p...>
• Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 09:59:19 +0100
• In-reply-to: <5FF67610-B9BB-11D8-B347-000A95CCC59E@x...>
• References: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E52020E8337@R...> <A6B1F79A-B9A4-11D8-B347-000A95CCC59E@x...> <40C66B6D.2060902@p...> <5FF67610-B9BB-11D8-B347-000A95CCC59E@x...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a1) Gecko/20040520

Michael Champion wrote:

> Not to channel  Udell too often in one day, but how is that different 
> from HTML with metadata inserted as a side effect of CSS styling?  
> Anyway, I'm definitely not disagreeing, this is a very useful approach.

I guess in two ways. One is structural - you could end up laying out 
@class tags in ways that's it hard to pull back structured info (be 
it 3-tuples or somethin). The other is idiom - that is, it's not 
idiomatic to use URLs in @class attributes (I don't recall if CSS 
syntax would support such URLs).

On the other hand, doing something as simple as hacking blogging 
catgeories (many people have maybe half a dozen or so) onto URLs can 
give you quite useful metadata. For example, I tend to use WikiWord 
syntax on the basis that someday I'll get of my arse and merge that 
namespace with my Wiki. So you can prime things in low effort ways.

In practical terms @class is still very useful; I have a colleague 
in Propylon, Clyde Hatter, who leverages @class attributes in markup 
to great effect.


> So "metadata" is "content" transformed into a more conveniently 
> machine-processable form?  

I think so; it can be good enough or useful enough given the burden 
that's been taken off the user.


> OK, that does explain a lot of points that I 
> wasn't understanding in your, or Dare's or Joshua's arguments.  It's not 
> what I thought of as metadata, or what Doctorow is flaming.  I guess we 
> need a meta-model of metadata to keep this all straight!

:) Fwiw, I don't buy into the more GOFAI visions. I don't see that 
we'd neccessarily reach a semantic inflection point without a 
statistical/signal processing layer in the architecture doing the 
bulk of the work.

cheers
Bill
-- 
Propylon
http://www.propylon.com

• References:
  • RE: The triples datamodel
    • From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
  • Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathreadthing)
    • From: =?UTF-8?B?QmlsbCBkZSBow5NyYQ==?= <bill.dehora@p...>
  • Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>

• Prev by Date: RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
• Next by Date: RE: The triples datamodel -- was Re: SemanticWeb permathread, iteration n+1
• Previous by thread: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
• Next by thread: RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic webmega-permathread thing)
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread