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Chris McGee newton688 at gmail.com
Sat Apr 24 14:44:43 BST 2021
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The purpose of my RFC is to try to find specific feedback so that I canimprove it. This is just a first draft and I hope to get early feedback, soI'm sure that it may not be in the best shape right now. If you find itcomplicated and hard to understand, I'd like to learn how to make thatbetter, both in the way that I'm presenting the ideas and the specificationitself.
I think that there are a number of benefits to using RDF that I hope canenrich the Gemini space too. Adding semantic data to a resource both helpsreaders and computers to read specific detail out of a page or pages. Aninteresting example is wikipedia with those informative tables for certaintopics of pages. Generally, you can go to a city and see not only niceflowing paragraphs about the place, but also focus on specific details,such as population, district and country. The authors for these pages havedecided on some standards on what should go in those tables and the contentevolves over time. While wikipedia is probably a very rigid example, Ibelieve that semantics can be more organic and federated with discussionslike we are having here.
Semantic data doesn't have to be complicated and rigid. With RDF the schemadoesn't need to be written first. Anyone can come up with a concept URI andthen as its usage evolves someone can write up a formal schema descriptionof it, if ever. There are of course benefits to standardization both tohuman readers and also computers. Popular RDF schemas are viewable using aweb browser at the moment, but we can start writing our own using whateverURI we want, including Gemini, after some agreement on the syntax.
At the simplest level RDF can be a kind of tagging mechanism. In my RFC atthe beginning I just put a few triples in there that provide a type to theresource, a creative work. There's also a version number in case someonewants to cite a specific version of the RFC. It's marked as draft and myname is there for citation purposes. I could just leave the semantics atthat and there's already some benefits to both human readers and computers.If we came up with a concept URI for our RFCs in gemini and GUS wasindexing the types of resources then we might have a system for discoveringeveryone's RFCs out there.
I was hinting in my original email about using the Comment type forfeedback on the RFC. If we used this for feedback on RFC's and had supportfor that in one or more search engines then you can find comments out thereabout my RFC in gemini space itself and maybe even my own replies to those.This can be done without having to have a comment system built into mycapsule or anyone's capsule. The discussion can be federated. Gemini won'tneed to have first-class interactivity built into the protocol andbrowsers, which I feel is one of many things that makes the web soterrible. Everyone just keeps publishing resources to their capsules asthey do with this extra little bit of semantics.
What I like about RDF is that we can just decide to do this and thedecisions about the kinds of semantics that might be useful to all orsubsets of us can evolve over time. Maybe some of us want to build entireontologies between our capsules, shared, detailed vocabularies, whileothers are fine with just simple tagging mechanisms. Using some of whatI've written in the spec we could document some of the schemas as geminiresources themselves. Meanwhile, there are some useful schemas out there,like on schema.org. Why not be pragmatic and use them when they makesense?. I'm assuming that since we are having this discussion over emailthat we don't believe that everything needs to be gemini resources andgemini protocol. I'm assuming that we all still have web browsers, some areusing twitter, youtube, mastodon, etc.
I would love for example to make use of schema.org's event types to postevents, have people post their own replies to that event on their capsuleand then use the computer to find out who is coming. Wouldn't that be aninteresting way to have a federated option to facebook to be able to dothat kind of thing without having to turn gemini into an interactivebloated mess that is the web? On the other hand, maybe that kind of loftygoal won't pan out, but at least the barrier to entry would be low foranyone willing to try. Maybe someone will find a much lighter weight set ofRDF predicates? Or maybe this is just a bad idea that nobody will ever useit. Who knows, but with RDF these kinds of experiments are easy to try outand easy to evolve.
I know that the details of RDF can get very complicated and the mapping toGemini that I'm proposing is neither complete, nor perfect. I am trying toestablish just a few extra conventions on top of the Gemini format andconventions I've seen already to achieve a reasonable fit between the twotechnologies and perhaps enrich both of them. For the remaining 20%, thereare other RDF formats out there, such as Turtle and N-Triples, or XML(yuck) that can be hosted in a Gemini capsule, or a web server.
Thanks all for the feedback so far. I'm happy for the engagement instead ofjust *crickets*.
Chris
On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 3:10 AM Anna “CyberTailor” <cyber at sysrq.in> wrote:
Are there any benefits from using RDF? It's kinda complicated and hard
to understand.
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