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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