RDFa “an Integral Part of the Semantic Web”
Kurt Cagle writes about the future of XML, and says a few very interesting things about RDFa:
Similarly, I suspect that while RDFa may have a fairly major hill to climb in terms of adoption, it will likely end up becoming integral to the semantic web fairly soon. Folk ontologies (or folksonomies, as some have referred to them) are not in fact really ontologies at all - they are instead simply property associations. If you can articulate a consisten property relationship using attributes outside of the normal XHTML ones, then you can do more than simply tag a document - you can in fact create relationships between entities in an XHTML document without having to leave the context of that document. That’s what RDFa does. These can then be interpreted by RDF enabled tools, making it possible to achieve something of the holy grail of the semantic web - provide a simple way of nonetheless encoding metadata into a document. I’ve argued for years that RDF as it exists right now is too complex for your average web developer, and what’s more it perforce requires duplication of content between the RDF and XHTML (or whatever document format you’re using). Eliminate this need for duplication by embedded the descriptive relational characteristics directly in the element’s attribute set, and all of a sudden the Semantic Web begins to move away from being unachievable to being doable.