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I don't get spam in my feed reader because I select the feeds it's reading. Does RSS "cope with this thing we call the web"? It would be great if I didn't have
by bct 18y ago
I don't get spam in my feed reader because I select the feeds it's reading. Does RSS "cope with this thing we call the web"?
It would be great if I didn't have to select the feeds, if my feed reader would crawl the Web and show me things I like without forcing me to wade through heaps of crap. I don't think that's very realistic though, so it's still worth my effort to choose trusted data sources myself.
The same is true for many applications of the Semantic Web. If you want to buy a house, you won't send out a crawler looking for listings matching your criteria; you'll go to a site that aggregates real estate listings in your area. This isn't so different from how things work today.
Spam is a problem and fancy trust stuff is absolutely needed, but RDF & friends have a lot of value even without fancy trust stuff. The problem is (and has always been) convincing people with interesting data that they should publish it.
- nicklothian 18y agoSo what value does RDF give you exactly - especially compared to an easier to use format such as Atom or one of the non-DRF varieties of RSS?
- bct 18y agoWhy are you comparing RDF with syndication formats? Atom and RSS are formats for data that fits a specific pattern, RDF is a generic data structure. A better comparison would be RDF and XML. If there is some advantage to putting (e.g.) real estate data inside an Atom or RSS feed, you still need a format to represent the data itself. RDF's advantage is that it's extensible and makes it very easy to combine independent datasets. I don't think that Atom/RSS/XML are easier to use than RDF; they're just more familiar.