Re: Banging the identity drum again, this time REST-style

On 24/11/10 07:20, Carlo Moneti wrote:
> On 2010.11.23 08:54 Lars Heuer wrote:
>
>>> I'm sure you've had this feeling with the work you've mentioned
>>> doing on dbpedia dumps, but why should we have to do this.  Why are
>>> we, a very small community, trying to absorb the work of helping
>>> everyone else make sense of this information landfill we see and
>>> experience every day through the window of Google's search box?  Why
>>> can't we distribute this effort--just like the Web?
>
>> I just wondered why people should extend the links if the links work
>> for important technologies like RDF/LOD. I simply doubt that they
>> change it just because a few people on this planet like to see it more
>> Topic Mappish.

Hi Carlo and Lars,

Leaving aside discussion of 'data mining' and the like, web pages do
not need to be more Topic Mappish in order to be mappable, they just
need some way to incorporate element- or caret-location metadata easily
using simple markup.

Oh, that and a solid persistent identifier (PID) service would be
helpful.

> I always figured that if a major Web search engine service published
> a Link or Topic Maps fragment specification, and encouraged all Web
> publishers to annotate their Web pages and documents accordingly,
> with the incentive that such resources would then be richly linked
> and and easily found in their search context, I am sure worldwide
> annotation of Web resources would begin. Heck, the SEO industry
> would have a field day and could become the biggest promoter o
>Topic Maps. The current Topic Maps community could then relish in
> a 10,000 fold increase in the Topic Maps applications and services
> industry.

I respectfully disagree. Via the XML Namespaces spec we have the
means of inserting non-HTML markup such as RDF or XTM into a web
page, but (a) that pollutes the document and commits its author/
publisher to a specific non-web markup (whose semantics and syntax
are usually unknown, uninteresting and out of scope for most people),
(b) is overkill and overly complicated in fulfilling the actual
requirements, and (c) isn't supported by existing HTML editors
and/or browsers.

> Perhaps the current community could work on defining such a
> specification. Seems like the necessary first step to mass adoption.

Back in 2002 I cowrote a specification* that I believe provided
the necessary functionality, and did so without any major change
to HTML/XHTML, nor did it include non-HTML content in web pages:

     Augmented Metadata in XHTML
     Neocortext.Net Working Draft 10 May 2002
     Murray Altheim, Sean Palmer
     http://www.altheim.com/specs/meta/NOTE-xhtml-augmeta.html
     http://tinyurl.com/augmeta

...though I hold out little hope that at this point anyone would
do something so simple. It's a shame HTML 5 doesn't help in this
regard.

While there is little to no evidence to suggest it, some people
continue to feel that inserting complicated XML markup into web
pages is a more likely bet, so I leave them to that exercise. The
one area that we can continue to productively develop is the
groundwork of PSIs/URLs behind the implementation(s) in markup,
how those PSIs are created, what they mean (i.e., both logically
and epistemologically), how they interrelate, how they can be
surfaced as web services, etc.  There's still plenty of room for
interesting and valuable work.

One of the things missing in a lot of communities is an open
source reference implementation of the primary specifications.
We almost had that with tm4j and perhaps are approaching that
with Ontopia (though that is a commercial product). Building
a reference implementation around the Augmented Metadata spec
(or something similar) would be trivial, indeed, would hardly
be more than an hour's work. The bigger question is: would
anyone use it? What would it take for the network effect to
take hold?

Murray

* I would certainly rewrite that 2002 document now, as the prose
has problems, but the basic implementation in markup I still feel
is sound (and simple).
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

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