[Geowanking] geo microformat BOF session at Where 2.0

[Jo Walsh]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:22:58PM +0200, Mattias Konradsson wrote:
> format can be simplistic and easy to read and parse. However I don't believe
> "rdf vs microformats" is the issue, both are xml-based formats and it's
> fairly trivial to take them and translate to each other or some new format
> using xslt.

RDF isn't a format; it's a graph model, one possible encoding of which
is in XML (n3, n-triples and turtle are others). Once i have an RDF
parser, and a storage that understands schemas, i never need to look
at or think about parsing another piece of XML ever again. 

It took a while for that to 'click' with me, coming from a
DTD-oriented, SGML type perspective: reading the RDF primer helped
bootstrap my understanding: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
http://librdf.org/ is a very useful toolkit. 

> version they're using. This really is the story of html all over again, if
> you don't force authors to validate their content you'll end up with lots of
> ugly hacks to fix broken formats. Unfortunately it's a bit hard to enforce

there were some painful lessons to be learned in the RSS debacle and i
should like to think that we can make use of them now ;) i've used the
1.0 flavour as a carrier for geodata because it is popular, and
because this seems to have gone down better than previous attempts to
design something that looks like a 'format' but that's pure RDF/XML
(the 'locative packets' stuff). as you point out it's possible to xslt
between different 'formats'. i don't want to have to do that, i want
us all to be able to rise up and throw away our keyboards... ;)


-jo