[OGDev] What are people working on?

[Tom Heath]

Hi Kake,

On 15/03/07, Kake L Pugh <kake at earth.li> wrote:
> On Thu 15 Mar 2007, Tom Heath <tom.heath at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The URI that you plugged in is the URI of a "wiki entry about Angel",
> > SE16 4NB, not the URI of the thing itself.
>
> Ah-ha, thanks, I'd not spotted that.  Perhaps a quick fix would be to
> have the "RDF/XML" link in the navbar point to the URI of the thing
> itself, rather than the URI of the entry-about-the-thing?  That seems
> to make more sense to me, in terms of doing the Expected Thing.  After
> all, the interesting thing is the, well, thing, not the entry about it.

Great. Good idea.

> Lots of great ideas in your mail - thank you!  I started going through
> and replying bit by bit, but pretty much everything was "yes, that
> sounds cool, we should be able to do that".  So I'll just say it once,
> and it generally applies to the whole lot (some bits of it would, of
> course, take more work than others).

:) any time, glad you liked them.

> Do you think you'd be able to take the RDF output for that page, and
> edit in the stuff that you'd like to see there?  Just so we have a
> reference for what we're aiming for.  It's a lot easier to understand
> things when there's a concrete example.

Yeah, that sounds doable. Not sure what the timescale would be, as I
have a stack of stuff on at the moment, but could probably do it on a
"you let me know how soon this would be useful/how soon you need it"
basis, and I could try to fit it in accordingly.

> Regarding "pretty" URIs, I'm not sure we should be trying to
> incorporate URI rewriting within OpenGuides itself - and consequently
> I don't want us to depend on it to the extent of writing our RDF on
> the assumption that it's there.

Yeah, that's fair enough. If you can't depend on it then not worth the
risk. Might there be a way to make it a config option??

> Does a machine that's processing some
> RDF actually care that a URI isn't very attractive?

No, you're right, the machine doesn't care. But as in my reply to
Earle, I'm certain that URIs will end up in the hands of humans, just
as URLs have. <aside>I seem to remember reading somewhere that URLs
were never meant to be an interface device (i.e. never meant to be
manipulated by humans, enter into browsers etc). Unimaginable now
isn't it?</aside>

> And can't we use
> something like the <rdf:Description><rdfs:label> thingy in your Far
> From The Madding Crowd RDF to protect people using browsers like the
> Disco one from having to look at ugly URIs?

Yeah, absolutely, that's a good way to proceed. And in fact, despite
what I said before, the Semantic Web, by moving us away from
"documents" to things and statements, may actually be able to remove
the URI/L from the interface (not that Disco or (m)any of the other SW
browsers achieve this at present).

> Incidentally, an idea for other Guide admins - Bob made this for me:
>   http://london.randomness.org.uk/goodbeerguide
> which is memorable and easy to tell people (I just typed it in this
> mail, didn't go and look it up).  Simple things like this can make it
> easier to persuade people to go and look at your Guide.

Cool. Will have a look at doing some of those for the OGMK. Did he
just use rewrites to do it?

Cheers :)

Tom.