RDFa for Scholarship
So Jeni Tennison (who once very graciously helped me out awhile back on the XSLT list with trying to wrap my mind around XSLT 2), describes a very intriguing demo of integrating RDFa into web pages that could point to some interesting possibilities for scholarly publishing. So when you load the page, you see this:
So what’s going on here? A JQuery-based plug-in is extracting RDF triples from the page, and displaying that information in the panels on the left. That’s cool enough, but consider what happens if you add a note at the bottom of the page that “Erasmus Darwin was Robert Darwin’s father.” You get this confirmation:
So there’s some natural language parsing going on here that converts that into additional triples. These triples then get added to the human-facing display.
Hmm .. I might have to experiment with this when I get some time.
In other RDFa-related news, how cool is it that the new recovery.gov site makes use of RDFa (via John Breslin), or that slideshare does as well (see Ed’s post)?
