RDFa


I'm working on adding some RDFa markup to the object details on www.artsconnected.org, and hope to use this page to document my research and decisions - and get feedback along the way.

 

My primary struggle at the moment is picking a vocabulary.  There is some good brainstorming on a work of art microformat here, but I'm not sold on any of those at the moment. I think CDWAlite is a good enough standard, but the excessive nesting makes it prohibitive when the appeal of RDFa is the relative simplicity.  Richard Urban has a draft of an OWL model of CDWAlite, so if I go this route a lot of thinking has already been done.

 

Next: why bother with RDFa at all?  I'd love to do it because it's "correct", and go full on with everything we know from CDWAlite, etc, but really I want to do this primarily to help search engines find and understand our collection.  And I really doubt search engines have bothered to understand CDWAlite...  So this has really pushed my decision in the direction of plain old Dublin Core, with maybe some qualifiers, and using a few other well-understood vocabularies for the edges (comments, tags, etc).  ("Well understood" = on this page).

 

Thoughts?