Upon deciding that I would write an RSS feed for this site, and consider the possibility of using Web annotations to provide 'blog talkback (which, incidentally, seems completely unrealistic after further examination, given the present level of support of Web annotations on the client side), I endeavored to learn some more about RDF, which forms the basis of the semantic Web. I had previously learned something about RDF, but many things still escaped me, and I now understand it much better.
To illustrate it all, I “incarnated” myself as an
RDF resource: http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/meta.rdf#dmadore
(don't expect anything remarkable, or indeed anything even remotely
interesting, to happen if you follow this link—most probably
your browser won't know what to make of the file; maybe this
link will be of greater interest). Ideally I would like to
convert all of my personal information
page in RDF, but I don't think I'll be patient enough
to do this. But if for some reason you wanted to say something about
me in RDF language, the correct way to refer to me would
be the URL I just gave.
Update: Just as I finish writing this, Garoo points me to the FOAF project, a kind of Friendster-alike (see my previous entry concerning Friendster) except that it works in a distributed (non-centralized) fashion, with self-provided RDF descriptions. So I definitely have to look into this.