r. alexander miłowski, geek

Retro: Semantic Hybridization

Alex Miłowski

In 2015, I presented a short paper about "Semantic Hybridization" at XML Prague 2015. It is a technique I've been promoting for using RDFa and JSON-LD together. Rather than make a choice of one or the other, use the strengths of each of the ways of representing semantic annotations. The result is you can often avoid awkward constructions just for the sake of annotations.

It was presented on Valentines Day and so I themed the presentation as a love story of two data formats. Corny, yes. Welcome! I have pie too!

If you've ever gotten an e-mail from me, you'd recognize this quote that is in the presentation:

The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language considered. — Bertrand Russell (in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics)

That's explained a bit too but, to reiterate, your choice of syntax affects how we organize and convey information. With just RDFa or just JSON-LD, we might choose a particular set of annotations due to their convenience (or lack of convenience of other representations) but, by using both, we have expanded our syntax and the semantics we choose to represent.

I've included the presentation below, the full conference paper is available via their archives, and there is a video as well. Enjoy!

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