RDFa

When most of us think of blogs we think of people writing about fairly personal things, perhaps to do with their families or hobbies. At a push we might acknowledge that many bloggers will be writing about technical issues such as some trick they developed to get CSS to work in all browsers, or how to build a web-site with Ruby on Rails, Ajax or XForms.

But have you ever thought whether Marie Curie would have a blog, if she were carrying out her research today? It would be unlikely to contain information about what she was cooking for Christmas lunch, and far more likely to be like a live notebook of her results and working outs as she became the only person ever to win Nobel prizes in two different disciplines (chemistry and physics).

When it comes to the development of new knowledge the chance of significant breakthroughs is increased if knowledge is easy to share, particularly across disciplines. The internet provides an enormous opportunity to share knowledge across the world, and RDFa has a role to play here.

This thought struck me when reading Egon Willighagen’s blog which includes items about his use of RDFa to include metadata about his chemistry research. Here we have an exciting convergence of technologies; he uses Blogger.com to allow him to easily publish and manage his writings, and he is experimenting with using RDFa to provide metadata about the chemical compounds he refers to in his work. With this additional metadata two things are possible. First, the user experience is improved when accessing the blog (he talks of showing pictures of the molecular structure of a chemical when a user hovers over the name, for example), and second, the search experience is also improved; now a search could potentially yield documents ‘about’ the chemicals referred to, rather than other, non-specialist documents.

This is an exciting use of RDFa, and shows the benefit of recognising that there is a demand for the co-existence of different (sometimes specialist) vocabularies within the same document. Over the coming months I think we’ll see more of these kinds of use cases.