clauwa.info

I just read this interesting Blog Posting from Uldis, in which he talks about automatically creating connections between a HTML page and its associated external RDF file via RDFa. A lot of web sites expose their data via HTML sites and external RDF files, which are only connected via one link.

For example the HTML sites of this blog is connected with its external RDF data (generated by the SIOC Wordpress Exporter) via this link:

The basic question is how can the DOM nodes of an HTML page be automatically connected (e.g. via RDFa attributes) with the external description of the resource to which the nodes belong?

I like this idea of creating additional connections between HTML sites and related RDF files, because

1) they enrich the external RDF data with positional information (layout information) –> an agents can then look up for example in which order some embedded resources appear in the content of a certain blog post

2) they make it easier to find the semantic metadata belonging to a certain piece of HTML content –> for example think about a situation in which a user selects some content of a HTML page and a client site applications wants to get the semantic metadata of the resource to which the content belongs. The client site application knows to which DOM node the selected content belongs and could exploit the additional information which relate certain DOM nodes with external RDF information.

3) they make it possible to have different amounts of machine-readable and human-readable data which are still connected. This can be desirable if for example some data are simply not displayed on the HTML pages in order to not break the layout and design of a certain page. In this case no reason exist to also not make these data available in a machine-readable form. If all semantic metadata are directly embedded in the HTML page via RDFa than the machine-readable and human-readable amount of data must be the same or the HTML page must be wasted with a lot of hidden HTML tags.