I think this is very important and we should create a BO microformat for chemistry…
I’ve defected from the heavyweight stuff to the microformats tutorial – also goes along with GRDDL. Being given as a double act by Harry Halpin and Dan Connolly (see tutorial notes for all links). We are going to do a mashup of our calendars, Microformats include hCard, hCal, XFN, hReview, rel-tag. The lower case semantic web.
Microformats are exploding – but only apply to COMMON problems (e.g. date, people,) Microformats kind-of don’t validate – but do we care? There is apparently an emerging citation microformat
Example is of how someone can use her foaf to get hotel reviews from her friends. GRDDL and SPARQL can do this. Look at the examples in the tutorial.
A strong emerging theme is Open Data – the data that we put into a web site. “I want my data back” – Jon Bosak 1997. This is a slightly different dialect of “Open Data” – that which is used by Web 2.0
If we can hack this from the bottom-up we can add major value to chemistry.
“The semantic web is to spread sheets and databases what the web of hypertext documents is to wordprocessor files”
Can we generate viral growth – as we see in microformats.
so here is the key:
GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) is a way to boostrap RDF out of XML and in particular XHTML data by explicitly linking transformations from RDF to XML.
GRDDL terminology:
- Source Document: an XML document which references at least one GRDDL transformation and hence licenses a GRDDL-aware to extract RDF.
- GRDDL-aware agent: a software agent able to identify the GRDDL transformations and run them to extract RDF.
- GRDDL Transformation: an algorithm for getting RDF from a source document
… everything is in the tutorial …
we need profiles, e.g. in head element of HTML (perhaps a BO profile)
“SPARQL isn’t as bad as it looks”
declare namespaces with prefixes (so we need a BO one)
SELECT DISTINCT ?a ?b ?c
FROM (contents of URI)
WHERE {
sparql stuff
}
I am impressed. It will work for BO. Henry and I came up with something like “dublin-chem” many years ago. But microformats are much more powerful. We need to think of the key concepts in chemistry and set up BO microformats.
more later…