Last Call: RDFa Core 1.1, XHTML+RDFa 1.1
After posting the link to the slides on RDFa1.1 and R2ML, I went to the W3C website to check on the proposed revision of RDF (more on that later).
Anyway, I ran across the last call on RDFa Core 1.1, which reads in part:
The RDFa Working Group has published Last Call Working Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience.
But where it says: “These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications.”, that’s not really true.
Unless search and rendering engines have been doing a real good imitation of treating that structured data as though it were available.
What I think is meant is that the semantics of the structured data has not been specified, which is an entirely different question that making it available to tools and applications.
It is an important difference because as the experience with Linked Data shows, people have many different semantics that they associate with the same data.
When tools can read, or remain ignorant of, the many different semantics associated with the same data, what is this …new world of user functionality… that becomes available?
That’s the part that I am missing.