Procedural versus Declarative Semantics on the Web: Microformats, GRDDL, and RDFa
Harry Halpin · 2007
The alignment of the hypertext Web with the emerging Semantic Web should be a critical issue for both the further evolution of the Web, as the Semantic Web relies on a critical mass of deployed data in order to reach its full potential. With the rise of microformats, a compelling \\lower-case " semantic web has been arising organically. Recently, a large number of emerging standards from the Semantic Web community, in particular GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Description from Dialects of Language) and RDFa have emerged as dierent methodologies for bridging the gap between microformats, hypertext, and the Semantic Web. GRDDL solves this problem by allowing an XML document link to a procedure to that transforms the document to RDF. In contrast, RDFa solves the problem by allowing document authors to declaratively embed RDF in hypertext documents. While these technologies are movement to alignment between the Hypertext Web and the Semantic Web, they revive a debate in articial intelligence over the relative merits \\procedural " versus \\declarative " semantics, a debate that leads to fundamental issues at the heart of the Semantic Web.