small-s semantic web and CC

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Mon Feb 16 23:17:38 EST 2004


As I mentioned 
<http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-metadata/2003-December/000243.html> 
I find "semantic HTML" very interesting -- it keeps the metadata close 
to the presentation, militating against "metacrap" and can be used to 
populate the big-S Semantic Web through RDF generation.

Since then the RDF-in-XHTML proposal that builds on semantic HTML has 
moved ahead and generalized, see <http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec> 
"Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages" is a pretty 
good description.

Also, Kevin Marks and Tantek Celik headed up a very nice BoF at Etech 
<http://wiki.oreillynet.com/etech/hosted.conf?RealWorldSemantics> in 
which they discussed current small-semantic web implementations.  See 
that URL for some good links.

Largely, people are using the "rel" attribute of "a" elements
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#dtdentry_xhtml1-strict.dtd_a>
to describe "the relationship from the current document to the URI 
referred to by the element. The value of this attribute is a 
space-separated list of link types." 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-attribute-collections.html#col_Hypertext> 
(I can't find the equivalent documentation for XHTML1, but rel is 
supported, per the DTD above).

A neat thing on the presentation side is that CSS selectors can actually 
change the document rendering based on rel attributes -- making the 
metadata not just close to the presentation, but part of it.

Anyway, a rel attribute on anchors removes the big problem with assuming 
that a link to a license indicates that a page is available under that 
license -- the page could be linking to the license for any reason.  <a 
rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/"/> on 
the other hand, is no more ambiguous than the following RDF snippet

<Work about="">
   <license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/"/>
</Work>

and can be used to generate the same.

The upshot is that I'm planning to recommend adding a rel="license" 
attribute to links to CC licenses where the license applies to the 
current page, have <http://creativecommons.org/license/> spit that out, 
and encourage other apps to support the same.

Note that this is all entirely complementary with RDF.  All apps should 
continue to use/generate/support RDF, and RDF is required for making 
license (or any metadata) statements about resources other than the 
enclosing one.

-- 
   Mike Linksvayer
   http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21


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