UserPreferences

ComponentBlog


  1. Summary
  2. Description
  3. Use Cases and Potential Applications
  4. Architecture
  5. Examples
  6. Discussion

1. Summary

The AdaptiveBlogosphere is the result of a ComponentBlog. Packages of structured data are becoming post components. [PhilWolff]

2. Description

The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.

Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time.

When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model.

Consider a school soccer coach. An after game report typically includes:

Wouldn't it be handy for your blogging tool to:

News aggregators and news readers should be able to:

3. Use Cases and Potential Applications

I don't want to put a cap on this. It's like saying "web pages will be used for..."

Recipes and Golf Scores:

You should be able to define your own structure. The most common use of Microsoft Excel is making lists of things. No reason blogs can't give similar freedom to define a new package. Build from scratch or on the shoulders of other package definitions. Just for diversity sake:

Interop with enterprise applications:

So I define a "new customer bio" structure. My customer relationship management system writes RSS for me that includes new customer info. Not only can I cite that post in my blog, but:

Along the way...

4. Architecture

You should be able to pass along anything. There should be sufficient wrapper of the thing so:

Packages:

Package Syndication:

Package Discovery: I'm thinking we could follow the example of:

Package Aggregation and Analysis:

5. Examples

6. Discussion

[PhilWolff] This extension may be out of scope [WWW]per Sam's blog post

Would these be ContentModules or WellFormedEntry extensions? It would seem these structures would be more easily expressed as extensions to the WellFormedEntry, alongside or instead of more substantial content. In the case of "instead of content", it may mean that content should be optional. In other words, the WellFormedEntry is, itself, the content.

[AdamRice] Rumor has it (http://www.movabletype.org/news/2003_02.shtml#000783) that the upcoming Movable Type Pro will allow users to define arbitrary fields in their blogs, and a quick perusal of the MT support boards will show this is an urgently desired feature. So this might be in support of features that don't exist today, but well may before Halloween. Whether there's a need to provide recipes and soccer-match results as structured data to aggregators is one thing, and it's possible that once the feature exists in MT, nobody will use it, but if !Echo is going to provide good interop, this would be a Good Thing. It could also remove pressure to over-define the base spec with tags.

Related was originally a simple linking mechanism. Maybe we should consider it as a simple use case of DefinedDataModel + SyntaxExtensionMechanism + ComponentBlog. Please help to refactor the issues there to better understand the issues facing the larger issue of Semantic Web Logs.

[JonathanSmith] Does the ContextSensitiveServicesFramework under development have any bearing on this or other related discussions?

[AsbjornUlsberg] This extensibility will be fairly covered with the ExtensibilityFramework, and for all common extensions to Atom, there should be provided use-cases and well-formed Profiles. Such profiles should exist for XHTML, SVG, MathML etc.


Original author: PhilWolff

CategoryArchitecture, CategoryInterop, CategoryMetadata, CategoryModel, CategoryRss, CategoryExtension