RDDL and siteData-36

[Joe Gregorio <joe@bitworking.org>]

Reading TAG issue siteData-36[1] presents the problems
that fixed location files like 'robots.txt' and 'favicon.ico'
present to the web. Recently Dave Winer floated another
proposal that includes yet another file with a fixed
URI[2]. I panned this idea pretty hard[4] and began looking
around for alternate solutions to the problem, looking
at Tim Bray's strawman solution[3] at the conlusion of
which he writes:

"Of course, this leads inevitably to the question of what is a useful
representation for a site.  The kinds of stuff that could go there could
include robots info, language info, favicon.ico equivalent, RSS info,
p3p info, etc etc etc.  Unlike the RDDL issues we've been discussing, I
see little requirement for human readability, so this feels like a
natural for a small (but extensible) RDF vocabulary, who cares if it's
ugly.  The RDF assertions would mostly have as their subject the URI "",
which works well in this case.  -Tim"

I went back and looked at RDDL for inspiration and began to
prototype an RDDL file that would delineate some of
those resources, for example a 'favicon.ico' and 'robots.txt'.
Here is what I came up with so far:

<rddl:resource xlink:type="simple"
     xlink:title="RSS Feed - Full Content"
xlink:role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/rss+xml";
     xlink:arcrole="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#syndication";
     xlink:href="http://bitworking.org/index.rss";
                                    >

<rddl:resource xlink:type="simple"
     xlink:title="RSS Feed - Comments"
xlink:role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/rss+xml";
     xlink:arcrole="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#syndication";
     xlink:href="http://bitworking.org/comments.rss";
                                    >

<rddl:resource xlink:type="simple"
     xlink:title="robots.txt"
     xlink:role="http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html";
     xlink:href="http://bitworking.org/robots.txt";
                                    >

<rddl:resource xlink:type="simple"
     xlink:title="Favicon"
xlink:role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/jpeg";
     xlink:arcrole="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#icon";
     xlink:href="http://bitworking.org/favicon.ico";
                                    >

The first two examples are pointers to RSS feeds, the third is a pointer
to a 'robots.txt' file and the third points to a 'favicon.ico'.

Now I have the following questions:
1. Do these look right? I'm pretty unsure of my
    choices for Purpose and Nature for each of these.
2. Note that the list of RSS feeds could be quite large
    as the initial impetus for this was Jeremy Zawodny
    trying to find a way to list all the feeds that Yahoo!
    produces. Now instead of just a flat listing
    this number of feeds would probably
    best be grouped into categories. Am I missing something
    or does RDDL not allow a grouping of resources?
3. Going back to Tim's initial proposal, are there
    any thoughts on what that
    "small (but extensible) RDF vocabulary" would look like?

	Thanks,
	-joe

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#siteData-36
[2] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/myPublicFeedsOpml
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Feb/0297.html
[4] http://bitworking.org/news/No_Fishing

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