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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-metadata <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: small-s semantic web and CC
  • Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:17:38 -0800

As I mentioned <https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/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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