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Although he used to come to my bookstore, I didn’t meet Christopher St. John until a few years ago. Because he lives in Dallas, we usually only connect in person during conferences. You can follow Christopher’s blog at artofsystems.blogspot.com. |
Lynn Bender: Chris, good to catch up with you. I heard the word Semantics, and got exited. Tell me about what you will be presenting at BarCampAustin III.
Christopher St. John: I’m getting together with Taylor Cowan (from Sabre/Travelocity) and Dan Connolly (from the w3c) to do some outreach for some big-S semantic web technology. Mainly RDFa (a clean way to annotate HTML with semantic data), but probably also GRDDL (a way to extract all sorts of semantic markup, not just RDFa, from web pages). Assuming he survives the bike trip down, Jay Fichialos (also from Sabre/Travelocity) will be helping, too.
Bender: when I first read about RDF I was thinking people were referring to pre-RSS type feeds. (I was still running rdf on GeekAustin until last week).
ckstjohn: Strangely, RDF really was the basis for one branch of the RSS technology tree.
Bender: so we’re talking about the same rdf? I’m just a few generations back?
ckstjohn: The RDF for feeds was one application of the underlying RDF technology.
Bender: Tell me more about GRDDL.
ckstjohn: GRDDL is a way to attach an XSLT stylesheet to a page. Instead of making the page all pretty for presentation, the stylesheet parses out all the semantic markup and formats it for automated processing. It’s sort of a stylesheet for the computer instead of for the user. There are GRDDL stylesheets for the “official” microformats, for RDFa, or you can write your own. It’s a cool technology that helps unify the big-S and little-s semantic web efforts.
Bender: What kind of users will benefit from these semantic efforts?
ckstjohn: The hope is that all of them will, but, the focus of the presentations at BarCampAustinIII is going to be on practical uses for real, working web designers and developers. The goal is to present techniques and tools you can use right away, without having to become an expert in formal logic.
Bender: It looks like that there will be quite a bit of discussion on microformats this year at BCAIII. Can you tell me anything about the other discussions?
ckstjohn: Well, a little hard to tell from the sessions page, but my suspicion is that techniques like microformats for adding semantic data to the web are moving from being novel to being just an accepted part of any new development. At least I hope so. RDFa and the surrounding technologies like GRDDL are more arrows that should be in any good web developer’s quiver.
Bender: What sort of tools are there for embedding semantic data to web docs? And are we all going to have to become ontologists?
ckstjohn: I sure hope not, but to some extent, any good developer already is an ontologist. The normal sort of stuff you do in information architecture (or less formally for any web site) is exactly the sort of thing you do in putting together an ontology. The nomenclature might be different, but the basic work is the same: understanding user needs and the problem domain.
I suspect there will be pre-canned semantics (like microformats) for many common tasks, but one of the points of the we’re going to try to make in the BarCamp session is that RDFa comes with a whole set of tools that make it (relatively) easy for any group of people to put together a shared vocabulary and deploy it to the web. Even if you haven’t got a problem domain amenable to official formalization, you can still get the advantages of semantic markup and data sharing.
Bender: Is there something peculiar to the BarCamp format that helps facilitate these type of presentations/discussions/workshops/ .
ckstjohn: In this case I think the informality and wide mix of people are a big help. Normal conferences tend to attract certain specific sorts of people who show up with a pretty specific focus (SXSWi for web designers and developers, something like Semantic Technology 2008 for the big-S semantic web geeks). BarCampAustin gives both groups a chance to sit down together.
I’m glad Taylor Cowan and Dan Connelly are going to be there. Taylor has spoken before on these topics, and of course Dan is a W3C heavyweight. It ought to be a great session.
Bender: Chris, I really appreciate the time you took giving me some info on this. I will probably be there most of the day soaking it in.
ckstjohn: Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to share, looking forward to it.
