A question of Semantics?

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 comments

After writing yesterday about Paolo's AjaxOffice, Danny Ayers asked "Why Atom?" (pointing out Piggy Bank and other cool Semantic projects that exist.)

Atom came to mind as it seems to require less from the developer. If I am writing a new Greasemonkey script to grab every address I see and put them in my Atom Store, it is easy (also easy in Piggy Bank since it is already supported). But if I want to add more meta-data (tags, photos, etc), it seems easier to just add new tags to the existing atom. If the app doesn't know how to see the new tags, at least they see the address.

My use case for my thought experiments is a system where everything I do is stored. Items can be tagged and annotated, and more advanced meta-data can be mined using greasemonkey - microformats, screen scraping, or output from another service that uses the URI as input. (sounds kinda like Piggy Bank..)

I think it comes down to Semantic vs semantic and I'm not anti-Semantic!

Parting thought: Perhaps the store should work with both RDF and Atom?

Responses to "A question of Semantics?"

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 Danny says:
I've very much got my own biases about this (e.g. the stores I'm playing with work with RDF now, Atom can - and no doubt will - come later). So it's informative to see how other people are approaching more or less the same set of problems using more or less the same pool of technologies. But I do have a good feeling about the way things are going at the moment - much of the "semantic" is "Semantic" for free. re. your use case - like quite a few other folks around RDF tech, I'm after a personal knowledge base to capture and integrate a lot more of my input and output. I'm not (yet) bothered about "everything I do", but Jo Walsh for one is looking at that: http://frot.org/devlog/0016_hyperlogging.html