Instead of a flood of tweets I thought I'd go a bit old school and do some live blogging from the SemTech 2011 session Discovering and Using RDF for Books at O'Reilly Media this morning.   My own interest in this session is how we might apply this to texts coming from our local repository and in particular related to our Yellowbacks Project which we hope to enhance soon.  We also have a body of texts sitting on our servers in TEI format and we haven't landed on a way to comfortably leverage that in our infrastructure.  My own comments here appear in parenthesis (like so).

O'Reilly took their first stab at modeling information about their books in straight XML in a bit of a "tag soup" approach. This proved way too heavyweight for them and they ended up being late in delivering products because of the time it took to modify and extend their XML approach.  They then moved onto ONIX as an internal format, but it was old and writing xpath was a bit nightmarish because of the standards drift involved and other reasons.  In the end it was just not extensible and not friendly toward being agile.   That lead them to take a stab and creating their own schema, which also proved too heavyweight and slow.  Alas they washed up on the shores of Dublin Core, specifically with DC Terms and this introduced them to the world of RDF.

The extensibility of RDF starting with DC seemed pretty cool and useful to them and they kept adding FOAF, BIBLIO and more.  More useful for the company, the problem at the end of the day was they were still thinking in XML terms.  (Implying they should have been thinking in RDF and triples terms instead ...