I've started learning RDF, and I think it's a pretty good match for my bliki-with-refinements idea. Of course this only makes sense, since refinements thrive on metadata, and RDF is a generic mechanism for encoding metadata. But there are some non-obvious observations that make RDF especially interesting.
First, you have to remember that the kind of site I'm envisioning is based on a front page that consists simply of a collection of items -- e.g. all the blog posts you've ever made. Refinements are simply hyperlinks that restrict your view to a subset of these items -- for example, all the posts made in August. In RDF terms, you're restricting yourself to the set of posts which are the subject of a "Month Posted" predicate whose object is "August".
You can group refinements by the name of the predicate. E.g. you could have a group called "Month Posted", with values for "August", "July", "June", etc. This provides the kind of grouping that you can see in the Tower Records example (where they group by genre, composer, media, price, etc).
You can also use RDF to specify hierarchy. For example, that "August 14, 2003" should be subordinate to "August 2003", which is subordinate to "2003".
But the coolest thing about using RDF is that it's not limited to predicates whose objects are simple values. You can also have objects that are themselves subjects of other predicates. This would let you create predicates like "Next" and "Previous", which link one post to another. This is one area where the company I work at is a bit weak -- once you get to a particular item (post), you're all on your own, with no metadata other than the data about that particular post. There's no inter-item metadata at all.
Lastly, RDF provides a great way for the site to expose the metadata it's using back to the world. It could embed the RDF about items right into the page, so that the world at large could use that metadata as well. Bring on the Semantic Web, hey?
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Posted on August 14, 2003 04:50 PM
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