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How is RDFa used?

I was wondering how RDFa is being used. More specifically, if the Semantic web of data is made up of triplees in RDF, how does a consumer of RDFa content use that data? Does it have to be converted with a tool like GRDDL? Or are there other methods of getting the semantic data from RDFa websites?

Thanks, Bruce

Solution

  • One way is to use an RDFa parser to extract the triples from the RDFa document, and then process them in your app. this is what Google and co do in their search engines, I imagine.

    Alternatively you can tell a SPARQL store (either in memory or persistent) to load the document, either with it's API, or SPARQL 1.1's LOAD command, and then use SPARQL queries to access the data. This will also allow you to query across many documents at the same time.

    I would probably advise against trying to process triples directly unless your app or data is very simple.