http://simonwillison.net/2025-09-06T06:41:49+00:00Simon Willison2025-09-06T06:41:49+00:002025-09-06T06:41:49+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/iancal/#atom-tag

<blockquote cite="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45135302#45135852"><p>RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation.</p> <p>There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred for this use case?</p> <p>You only have one ID for Apple eh? Companies are complex to model, do you mean Apple just as someone would talk about it? The legal structure of entities that underpins all major companies, what part of it is referred to?</p> <p>I spent a long time building identifiers for universities and companies (which was taken for <a href="https://ror.org/">ROR</a> later) and it was a nightmare to say what a university even was. What’s the name of Cambridge? It’s not “Cambridge University” or “The university of Cambridge” legally. But it also is the actual name as people use it. <em>[It's <a href="https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/how-the-university-and-colleges-work/the-university-as-a-charity">The Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge</a>]</em></p> <p>The university of Paris went from something like 13 institutes to maybe one to then a bunch more. Are companies locations at their headquarters? Which headquarters?</p> <p>Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem:</p> <p>The correct modelling depends on <em>the questions you want to answer</em>.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45135302#45135852">IanCal</a>, on Hacker News, discussing RDF</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/hacker-news">hacker-news</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/metadata">metadata</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/sql">sql</a></p>

2009-05-11T14:41:17+00:002009-05-11T14:41:17+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2009/May/11/microdata/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019681.html">[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for</a></strong></p> Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/html5">html5</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ian-hickson">ian-hickson</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/markup">markup</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/microdata">microdata</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/microformats">microformats</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdfa">rdfa</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/semantics">semantics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/whatwg">whatwg</a></p>

2009-01-24T23:52:55+00:002009-01-24T23:52:55+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2009/Jan/24/crowbar/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Crowbar">Crowbar</a></strong></p> Headless Gecko/XULRunner which exposes a web service API for screen scraping using a real browser DOM—just pass it the URL of a page and the URL of a screen scraping JavaScript script (a bit like a Greasemonkey user script) and get back RDF/XML. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/crowbar">crowbar</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/dom">dom</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gecko">gecko</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/greasemonkey">greasemonkey</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/mozilla">mozilla</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/scraping">scraping</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/webservice">webservice</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/xml">xml</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/xulrunner">xulrunner</a></p>

2007-03-30T15:30:15+00:002007-03-30T15:30:15+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2007/Mar/30/triplr/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://triplr.org/">Triplr</a></strong></p> Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/atom">atom</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/grddl">grddl</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/html">html</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/json">json</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/microformats">microformats</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ntriples">ntriples</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rss">rss</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/semanticweb">semanticweb</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/triplr">triplr</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/turtle">turtle</a></p>

2007-02-15T00:22:10+00:002007-02-15T00:22:10+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/15/rdfa/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/14/introducing-rdfa.html">Introducing RDFa</a></strong></p> A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdfa">rdfa</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/xml">xml</a></p>

2002-08-31T14:01:18+00:002002-08-31T14:01:18+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2002/Aug/31/RDFisDead/#atom-tag

<p>Peter provides an <a href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/000358.html">interesting perspective</a>:</p><blockquote cite="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/000358.html"><p><strong>RDF is dead as a popular metadata format</strong>. If it was gonna happen, it would have already. Forget about it.</p></blockquote><p>Peter goes on to say (in the comments attached to the entry) that <acronym title="Resource Description Framework">RDF</acronym>'s biggest obstacle is the fact that it requires write-access - only the content owner can add meta data. External meta data implementations such as <acronym title="XML Topic Maps">XTM</acronym> and <acronym title="eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language">XFML</acronym> are inherently more flexible.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/peter-van-dijck">peter-van-dijck</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rdf">rdf</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/xfml">xfml</a></p>