Check out Bob DuCharme‘s article that introduces RDFa step by step and gives some background information. A second part to follow soon.
Archive for February 2007
Benjamin Nowack has updated his comparison of RDFa to other metadata embedding techniques. Benjamin states that
… pretending to be constructive, and in order to make things less biased, I embedded a dynamic page item that allows you to create your own, tailored comparison.
This is a Call for Proposals for RDFa utils and services. There is already an impressive amount of RDFa-software out there (see below), but still there may be a blind spot what is needed to improve one’s everyday work. What can you imagine might be worth to have? A plugin for a blog system, an editor, a semantic aggregator, etc.?
So far the following utils and services are known – at least to me:
- REST-based RDFa services, as a Elias’ extractor, or Ruben’s RDFa monkey
- DOM-based RDFa highlighter, as the RDFa Bookmarklets
- Libraries, as RDFLib
- RDFa editors, as the TopBraid Composer
- Plugins, as the MozCC plugin for Firefox, or the wordpress plugin, Daniel Lewis is working on
Please, post your whish list here, tell us about your implementation, or simply state that you are happy with all we have so far 
Incidentally, there is a draft of the RDFa Test Suite available, including an alpha-version of an automated RDFa Test Runner.
We found out last week that the MultimediaN N9C Eculture, a project from the Netherlands that provides rich structured data about museum pieces, is publishing RDFa. Click on their online demo, and browse the artwork. Then try out the RDFa bookmarklets to see the data.
It’s easy to publish RDFa. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission, you can reuse existing vocabularies, you can invent your own, or you can mix and match. Bottom-up structured data, in truly distributed, web-friendly way.
Bob DuCharme shows just how easy it is to have Movable Type produce RDFa. His solution puts all of the metadata in the head of the page for now, but it’s just a bit of templating away from marking up the actual rendered data, which is what RDFa is all about.
Meanwhile, there are new drafts of the RDFa Primer and RDFa Use Cases out. These are just editorial drafts, but they’re getting close to final, so send your comments to the mailing list!
