[tech] Draft RFC: RDF/Semantic web metadata embedding in gemini resources

[Chris McGee]

The purpose of my RFC is to try to find specific feedback so that I can
improve it. This is just a first draft and I hope to get early feedback, so
I'm sure that it may not be in the best shape right now. If you find it
complicated and hard to understand, I'd like to learn how to make that
better, both in the way that I'm presenting the ideas and the specification
itself.

I think that there are a number of benefits to using RDF that I hope can
enrich the Gemini space too. Adding semantic data to a resource both helps
readers and computers to read specific detail out of a page or pages. An
interesting example is wikipedia with those informative tables for certain
topics of pages. Generally, you can go to a city and see not only nice
flowing paragraphs about the place, but also focus on specific details,
such as population, district and country. The authors for these pages have
decided on some standards on what should go in those tables and the content
evolves over time. While wikipedia is probably a very rigid example, I
believe that semantics can be more organic and federated with discussions
like we are having here.

Semantic data doesn't have to be complicated and rigid. With RDF the schema
doesn't need to be written first. Anyone can come up with a concept URI and
then as its usage evolves someone can write up a formal schema description
of it, if ever. There are of course benefits to standardization both to
human readers and also computers. Popular RDF schemas are viewable using a
web browser at the moment, but we can start writing our own using whatever
URI we want, including Gemini, after some agreement on the syntax.

At the simplest level RDF can be a kind of tagging mechanism. In my RFC at
the beginning I just put a few triples in there that provide a type to the
resource, a creative work. There's also a version number in case someone
wants to cite a specific version of the RFC. It's marked as draft and my
name is there for citation purposes. I could just leave the semantics at
that and there's already some benefits to both human readers and computers.
If we came up with a concept URI for our RFCs in gemini and GUS was
indexing the types of resources then we might have a system for discovering
everyone's RFCs out there.

I was hinting in my original email about using the Comment type for
feedback on the RFC. If we used this for feedback on RFC's and had support
for that in one or more search engines then you can find comments out there
about my RFC in gemini space itself and maybe even my own replies to those.
This can be done without having to have a comment system built into my
capsule or anyone's capsule. The discussion can be federated. Gemini won't
need to have first-class interactivity built into the protocol and
browsers, which I feel is one of many things that makes the web so
terrible. Everyone just keeps publishing resources to their capsules as
they do with this extra little bit of semantics.

What I like about RDF is that we can just decide to do this and the
decisions about the kinds of semantics that might be useful to all or
subsets of us can evolve over time. Maybe some of us want to build entire
ontologies between our capsules, shared, detailed vocabularies, while
others are fine with just simple tagging mechanisms. Using some of what
I've written in the spec we could document some of the schemas as gemini
resources themselves. Meanwhile, there are some useful schemas out there,
like on schema.org. Why not be pragmatic and use them when they make
sense?. I'm assuming that since we are having this discussion over email
that we don't believe that everything needs to be gemini resources and
gemini protocol. I'm assuming that we all still have web browsers, some are
using twitter, youtube, mastodon, etc.

I would love for example to make use of schema.org's event types to post
events, have people post their own replies to that event on their capsule
and then use the computer to find out who is coming. Wouldn't that be an
interesting way to have a federated option to facebook to be able to do
that kind of thing without having to turn gemini into an interactive
bloated mess that is the web? On the other hand, maybe that kind of lofty
goal won't pan out, but at least the barrier to entry would be low for
anyone willing to try. Maybe someone will find a much lighter weight set of
RDF predicates? Or maybe this is just a bad idea that nobody will ever use
it. Who knows, but with RDF these kinds of experiments are easy to try out
and easy to evolve.

I know that the details of RDF can get very complicated and the mapping to
Gemini that I'm proposing is neither complete, nor perfect. I am trying to
establish just a few extra conventions on top of the Gemini format and
conventions I've seen already to achieve a reasonable fit between the two
technologies and perhaps enrich both of them. For the remaining 20%, there
are other RDF formats out there, such as Turtle and N-Triples, or XML
(yuck) that can be hosted in a Gemini capsule, or a web server.

Thanks all for the feedback so far. I'm happy for the engagement instead of
just *crickets*.

Chris


On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 3:10 AM Anna “CyberTailor” <cyber at sysrq.in> wrote:

> Are there any benefits from using RDF? It's kinda complicated and hard
> to understand.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210424/179a25f3/attachment.htm>