Yesterday I exercised poetic license when I suggested that
Adobe’s Extensible
metadata platform (XMP) was not only the spiritual cousin of
microformats like hCalendar but also,
perhaps, more likely to see widespread use in the near term. My
poetic license was revoked, though, in a couple of comments:
Mike
Linksvayer: How someone as massively clued-in as Jon Udell
could be so misled as to describe XMP as a microformat is beyond
me.
Danny
Ayers: Like Mike I don’t really understand Jon’s references to
microformats - I first assumed he meant XMP could be replaced with
a uF.
Actually, I’m serious about this. If I step back and ask myself
what are the essential qualities of a microformat, it’s a short
list:
- A small chunk of machine-readable metadata,
- embedded in a document.
Mike notes:
XMP is embedded in a binary file, completely opaque to nearly
all users; microformats put a premium on (practically require)
colocation of metadata with human-visible HTML.
Yes, I understand. And as someone who is composing this blog
entry as XHTML, in emacs, using a semantic CSS tag that will enable
me to search for quotes by Mike Linksvayer and find the above
fragment, I’m obviously all about metadata coexisting with
human-readable HTML. And I’ve been applying this technique since
long before I
ever heard the term microformats — my own term was originally
microcontent.
(Via Jon Udell.)
I believe Jon is acknowledging the fact that the propagation of
metadata in "Binary based" Web data sources is no different to the
microformats based propagation that is currently underway in full
swing across the "Text based" Web data sources realm. He is
reiterating the fact that the Web is self-annotating
(exponentially) by way of Metadata Embedding. And yes, what he
describes is a similar to Microformats in substance and propagation
style :-)
Here is what I believe Jon is hoping to see:
- Binary files become valid data sources for Metadata oriented
query processing. Technically I mean a binary file becomes a valid
data source from which RDF Instance could be generated on the
fly.
- Enhanement or unveiling of the Data Web by way of meshups that
combine metadata from an array or data sources (not just the XML,
(X)HTML, or RDF variety)
- The ability to use an array of query languages and techniques
to construct these meshups
My little "Hello
Data Web!" meme was about demonstrating a view that Danny has
sought for a while: unobtrusive meshing of microformats and
RDF via GRDDL and SPARQL binding that simply eliminates the
often perceived "RDF Tax". Danny, Jon, myself, and many others have
always understood that making the Data Web (Web of RDF Instance
Data) more of a Force (Star Wars style) is the key to unravelling
the power of the "Web as a Database". Of course, we also tend the
describe our nirvana in different ways that sometimes obscures the
fundamental commonality of vision that we all share.
Personally, I believe everyone should simply "feel the force" or
observe "the bright and dark sides of the force" that is RDF.
When this occurs en masse there will be a global epiphany (similar
to what happened around the time of the initial unveiling of the
Web of Hypertext). Jon's meme brings the often overlooked realm of
binary based metadata sources into the general discourse.
JBinary Files as bona fide Data Web URIs (i.e. Metadata Sources)
is much closer than you think :-) I should have my "Hello Data Web
of Binary Data Sources" unveiled very soon!