More metadata activity
While the BlogMD initiative
works out its data model (and its name), I’m continuing to update my
Thread Description Language (which is
looking more and more like my final name choice, it even has a
reasonable abbreviation). I’ve finally
sat down and typed up its RDF Schema. I’m not
aware that any software can use it, but I figure it might as well
get done sometime.
Some of the discussion among the BlogMD people led me to thinking
about the Blogchalking project,
which provides a coding convention for describing the authors of
weblogs, particularly the area where they live. What intrigued me
was that it didn’t use the traditional street address, instead it
used a pathname-like hierarchy to identify locations. My hometown
is United States/New Jersey/Chatham. This avoids dealing with the
fact that street addresses have multiple formats world-wide and
puts things in an order better-suited to matching.
Naturally, my thoughts turned to
RDF: If
I could work out some way to represent this, it could easily
extend the functionality of TDL
for weblogs. The result, which came to me late at night when I was
trying to sleep, is WAIL,
the Where Am I Language. (Where I Am makes more
sense, but Where Am I leads to a better acronym.) Like the
Blogchalking data, WAIL
is not concerned with Post Office–friendly address formats;
it is designed instead to identify locations in terms of other
locations. WAIL adds
place types and a much looser hierarchical structure, allowing you to
pick your level of detail and specificity.
As an example of how multiple systems can work together in
RDF,
I’ve also posted this example
RSS file which
uses RSS 1.0,
TDL, and the
Dublin Core
to describe a weblog, FOAF to describe the author,
and WAIL to say
where the author lives.
Meanwhile, in the non-RDF
metadata world, I’ve posted an (incomplete) draft of the
web threading
HTML profile.
This is a few definitions and a coding convention which can be
used to create web pages that software agents can extract useful
information related to threading from. It and
TDL spring
from the same source (in fact, the profile came first), but I’m
just now getting some documentation up now that it’s been split
into its own specification. Unlike
TDL and
WAIL, this one actually
has some software which uses it. ZedneWeb conforms to a slightly-older
version of the profile, and I have a Perl script which can pull the
addresses, references, and a title for each post in a page. With
some wrapper code, I use it to generate ZedneWeb’s
RSS feed. (Ironic
that the most implemented of my technologies is the least documented.)
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