[whatwg] Trying to work out the problems solved by RDFa

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 1, 2009, at 06:41, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> There are many cases where people build their own dataset and  
> queries to solve a local problem. As an example, Opera is not  
> intersted in asking Google to index data related to internal  
> developer documents, and use it to produce further documentation we  
> need. However, we do automatically extract various kinds of data  
> from internal documents and re-use it. While Opera does not in fact  
> use the RDF toolstack for that process, there are many other large  
> companies and organisations who do, and who would benefit from being  
> able to use RDFa in that process.

If the data production and consumption are both under the control of  
one entity (Opera in this case), why does the solution need to be  
engineered for spontaneous integration of decentralized data sources?

Do the savings of using off-the-shelf tools outweigh the cost they  
impose by not being quite right for any specific purpose? Presumably  
the Opera-specific processing is more significant than generic  
parsing. Or is it?

It seems that RDFa is motivated by private data and by interchange at  
the same time. This suggests multiple bilateral access control  
agreements instead of a Web-like system where data is made available  
for GETting without prior agreement between the parties.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/