Raw

I just posted the following bits (reformatted here) in a long post to the Social Bookmarking Interchange Format list, the subject matter being a familiar scenario. Although I've posted about this stuff loads of times before, the range of solutions has improved loads, the old "XML versus RDF" arguments that were pretty artificial to start with have pretty well evaporated. Best of both worlds gets easier all the time. So in a situation where a new format seems desirable, but both XML-only and RDF developers must be kept happy, what can one do?

...there are at least two places in the middle ground:

1. Constrained RDF/XML : if a subset of RDF/XML is used, then it *can*be parsed as easily as any other XML format. RDF tools can still parse it directly, but when serialising some extra effort will be needed toensure the output matches the constraints. DOAP is a good example of this approach.

Rationale :

Making your documents more "RDF-friendly" -- that is, more easily digestible by RDF applications -- broadens the range of applications that can use your documents, thereby increasing their value.

2. GRDDLable XML : if the format is associated with a standard

mapping, and documents can easily be identified as being in the

bookmark format, then RDF interpretation can take place automatically.

Microformats are the leading example of this approach *.

* hmm, I should have worded that better - microformats and GRDDL/RDF are totally independent, but they do also happen to be the same stuff from different viewpoints 

Rationale :

It seems to me that if you have a notation, and a well-defined transformation from that notation to RDF, then what you've defined is,whatever else it might be, simply a non-RDF/XML notation for RDF.After all, what's RDF/XML?  It's an XML notation with a defined transformation from that notation to RDF. There just happens to be a W3C spec for it.

What I forgot to include was a pointer to Tim Berners-Lee's Levels of semantics in publication slide.