[whatwg] Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

[Paul Prescod]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, Ben Adida wrote:
>>
>> Consider specifically the Craigslist example, where the user selects a
>> few of the apartments and says "map these."
>>
>> Clearly, and as the voice-over states, the site needs embedded metadata
>> that easily connects "what the user is pointing to" to the structured
>> data required for mapping.
>
> Since Craigslist doesn't have structured data now, that seems like a
> verifiably false claim. :-)
>
> In fact, Craigslist is a great example. Given how hostile Craigslist has
> been to people reusing their data, and how unstructured their page is now,
> what reason do we have to believe that they would ever make their data
> accessible using RDFa? (Or any other metadata system in fact.)

I don't really understand why there is any debate about the utility of
metadata in general. Are you also against microformats? Title
elements? The meta element?

It seems obvious to me that a) metadata has been a huge success on the
web (the success of other techniques like NLP and PageRank
notwithstanding) and b) we haven't yet invented every metadata tag we
need. I think it is worthwhile to debate whether RDFa is the right
solution but do we really want to go back to a debate over whether
metadata is valuable or not?

This is useful stuff, right?

http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/06/microformats-in-google-maps.html
http://greasemonkey.makedatamakesense.com/google_hcalendar/

 Paul Prescod