August 02, 2003
Yet another reason to use RDF
Are you in the Seattle area and using the Seattle Wireless services?
There's an RDF file of their coverage locations. If you wanted to indicate that you're located or using one of those locations you can do it in your own Foaf, RSS-1.0 or other RDF file.
Let's say you were in the Ballard neighborhood. In looking at the RDF file there's one being run by Tom O'Hern. In the data file it's known as Node116. Since the file contains rdf:ID's on it's nodes you can reference them by adding them to the URL. That one would be known as: http://www.caseyhalverson.com/wispot.rdf#Node116
You can then take that URI and use it in your own files. You might simply say
<wl:Node rdf:resource="http://www.caseyhalverson.com/wispot.rdf#Node116" xmlns:wl="http://hackdiary.com/wireless/">
The examples the folks here are demonstrating could use a little improvement. But their first stab at this is really well done. What's possible here is the folks that really grok the RDF concepts can work with them to refine their markup.
Ok, so you're thinking, why bother? Well, when you make use of a common vocabulary you'll make it extremely easy for other programs to search you data and know what it actually means. Any other program, website or whatever, when it sees your use of that data it'll be able to know what you're talking about.
The upshot of all this is that, by using things like RDF, it becomes possible to have your data be overlaid with data from other sources and have it actually mean something. If you make a Foaf file for yourself and note that you're near a wireless node and then you also put a reference to the Foaf file in your RSS-1.0 feed a search engine that understand the Semantic Web will be able to undestand it. It'll be able do something like 'search for feeds near this wireless node' and then also be able to traverse across to other nodes, other people and feeds having used that as a starting point.
Yes, things like Google have ways of doing a lot of this for you. But consider, for a moment, how it's very difficult to filter through the firehose-like stream of results provided by a search based on text keywords. Sure, you can use better keywords, but how many times do you run up against not being able to come up with 'just the right keywords' that zero in on the correct answers? If a combination of things like keywords and things like RDF are used then it really becomes possible to start doing much more intelligent searches.
Anyway, this is a cool example of how RDF allows for you to add other bits of data without programs having to go through a lot of extra trouble to figure out what you mean.
