Subject: Structured Publishing -- Joe Reger shows the way...

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 12:23:20 -0400

I've written a blog post pointing to a wonderful demo of tools for doing
structured publishing in blogs that Joe Reger has put together. Given that
Atom has built-in support for handling much more than just the text/HTML
that RSS is limited to, I think this should be interesting to the Atom
community.

http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/09/joe_reger_shows.html

What can we do with Atom to make the vision of Structured/Semantic
publishing more real?

            bob wyman

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2005 16:51:04 -0700

Bob Wyman wrote:

> I’ve written a blog post pointing to a wonderful demo of tools for 
> doing structured publishing in blogs that Joe Reger has put together. 
> Given that Atom has built-in support for handling much more than just 
> the text/HTML that RSS is limited to, I think this should be 
> interesting to the Atom community.
>
There really isn't anything we HAVE to do with Atom to make it suitable 
for Structured publishing. The format's content model is already more 
than adequate for this kind of thing. For instance, Joe Reger's software 
could easily stuff the XML data instances that conform to a logs XML 
Schema into the atom:content element while including the text 
description of the log into the atom:summary. The only thing that really 
needs to happen here is for someone to begin writing the code that makes 
this happen.

- James

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From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 23:57:32 +0200

Is  DOAP over Atom [1] an example of the type of solution you are  
suggesting James?
That looks good. But what if I want to annotate an entry with some  
RDF? In a recent
blog [2] I describe a cool bar in Zürich. I mention that I would also  
like to add
to my feed information pertaining to the description. So I would like  
for example to
say that my entry is about a particular bar, give the address of the  
bar, its geo location
perhaps, that it has free wifi, and that it is very friendly. This  
would allow search engines
to index much more structured information about the bar than they  
otherwise could. This would
allow Google Maps for example to give a location to my feedback on  
their maps. In the DOAP over
Atom type solution where the RDF is placed inside the content, there  
is then
no more space to put the entry content itself. So I can either put  
the text entry into the content
or the metadata. Where should the metadata go?

Henry Story

[1] http://www.codezoo.com/about/doap_over_atom.csp
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bblfish/20050910

On 10 Sep 2005, at 01:51, James M Snell wrote:
>> doing structured publishing in blogs that Joe Reger has put  
>> together. Given that Atom has built-in support for handling much  
>> more than just the text/HTML that RSS is limited to, I think this  
>> should be interesting to the Atom community.
>>
> There really isn't anything we HAVE to do with Atom to make it  
> suitable for Structured publishing. The format's content model is  
> already more than adequate for this kind of thing. For instance,  
> Joe Reger's software could easily stuff the XML data instances that  
> conform to a logs XML Schema into the atom:content element while  
> including the text description of the log into the atom:summary.  
> The only thing that really needs to happen here is for someone to  
> begin writing the code that makes this happen.
>
> - James
>

---

From: "A. Pagaltzis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:00:36 +0200

* Henry Story <[email-masked]> [2005-09-12 00:05]:
> In the DOAP over Atom type solution where the RDF is placed
> inside the content, there  is then no more space to put the
> entry content itself. So I can either put  the text entry into
> the content or the metadata. Where should the metadata go?

Hmm. I think it’s not metadata that we’re talking about here,
it’s data. The location etc aren’t a description of your weblog
entry, they’re a description of a place. So is your article.

In other words, your article is “meta”data about the cool bar.

So it goes inside the RDF that is the entry’s content.

Now, that’s not going to be accessible to clients who don’t know
look in the right place in the graph.

So you put a copy of the article in your atom:summary, because it
summarizes the full thing available in the RDF payload.

Does that sound about right?

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>

---

From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 17:46:14 -0700

> Is  DOAP over Atom [1] an example of the type of solution you are  

This is exactly what I'm talking about. 

> That looks good. But what if I want to annotate an entry with some  RDF? 

The question is: is the metadata you're wishing to add descriptive of 
the entry or descriptive of whatever it is you're talking about in the 
entry?  If it's the former, add the namespaced elements directly to the 
atom:entry and use something like GRDDL to extract the information you 
need during processing.  If it's the later, what you're really talking 
about is content that belongs in the content element.

- James

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From: Eric Scheid <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:39:26 +1000

On 12/9/05 9:00 AM, "A. Pagaltzis" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hmm. I think it¹s not metadata that we¹re talking about here,
> it¹s data. The location etc aren¹t a description of your weblog
> entry, they¹re a description of a place. So is your article.
> 
> In other words, your article is ³meta²data about the cool bar.
> So it goes inside the RDF that is the entry¹s content.

I was thinking the opposite. The article goes into content as text/xhtml,
and the RDF goes into the <entry> as extensions.

> Now, that¹s not going to be accessible to clients who don¹t know

Again, all the RDF extensions won't be accessible to clients that don't know
where to look, but the article content will be available, because it's one
of the baseline formats.

> summarizes the full thing available in the RDF payload.

Not if it's a long article, please.

e.

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From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 02:08:07 -0400

Eric Scheid wrote:
> The article goes into content as text/xhtml, and the RDF goes
> into the <entry> as extensions.
	Every Atom entry is supposed to have an alternate HTML
representation or be an alternate representation of some HTML. Given that,
then where would one find the RDF in the HTML representation of the entry?
	I believe it doesn't make sense for us to add data-carrying elements
to Atom other than atom:content or atom:summary. Atom provides a definition
of a collection of entries and it provides the entry format. Frankly, it
should stop there. The data payload should be carried in the content
element.
	This is the approach we take with "Stuctured Blogging"[1]. The idea
is that you insert the machine parseable data into the content element and
you also insert it into the body of the HTML that is an alternate of the
atom:entry. Thus, the machine readable data can be found either by reading
the feed or by reading the HTML pages that are alternates of the entries in
the feed. One of the very nice things about this approach is that it enables
data to be carried in HTML, XHTML, RSS, and Atom with complete consistency
and without having to define extensions to any of the formats. Additionally,
because Structured Blogging relies on normal XML, it means that the same
data that you embed in HTML, XHTML, RSS and Atom can also be processed
without modification by normal and widely available XML parsers, tools, etc.
By providing GRDDL transformations for Structured Blogging entries, we also
gain the benefit of being able to directly address the needs of the
RDF/OWL-semantic processing crowd. All this can be done without defining new
extension elements, without having to coordinate between extensions in RSS
and Atom and without breaking any rules of HTML and/or XHTML. 
	Data should be in the content element...

		Bob wyman

[1] http://structuredblogging.org

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:22:10 -0700

>should stop there. The data payload should be carried in the content
+1. Let's not duplicate the problems with RSS's lack of a clean content 
model.  Content data should always be contained in the atom:content and 
atom:summary elements period.

- James

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From: Danny Ayers <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:36:34 +0200

> should stop there. The data payload should be carried in the content

I believe the ability to include data outside the content is likely to
be useful, and may even be essential in some republishing scenarios
where additional metadata about the payload is required. But that's
not to say the transport-only view of Atom doesn't offer big
advantages in the Structured Blogging kind of scenario where the data
can be neatly packaged, relatively opaquely to the rest of the entry
data. (Atom as SOAP lite?)

One aspect I am curious about - are you intending to use the Atom
entry ID as an identifier within the content at all? Any issues there?

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com

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From: Kevin Marks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:10:17 -0700

> data. (Atom as SOAP lite?)

I agree with Bob rather than Danny, except that I'd advocate making the 
metadata part of the XHTML content. Using Atom as a rich envelope in 
this way combines very well with the Microformat approach of retaining 
structure in XHTML.

For the example of lists of information, given earlier, the XOXO 
microformat is ideal, as it can degrade gracefully for all viewers. 
Microformat aware viewers can extract the structure, HTML viewers can 
display it in a clear human readable form, and even plain-text viewers 
(assuming they have enough nous to strip stuff between <>) will have 
the core content.

http://microformats.org
http://microformats.org/wiki/xoxo