RDFa

A very interesting application of RDFa has been announced recently: Ontology Online. It is what I would call a Web 3.0 application, using the best of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web – check it out!

Ian Davis has an interesting post about the Shadow Web that may be created if we don’t bridge the existing (“clickable”, as I like to say) web and the semantic web:

Current practice in the Semantic Web community is leading to the creation of a shadow web that is becoming disconnected from the web of documents. This fracturing is being caused by the W3C’s decision to restrict the types of resources that can be addressed directly with HTTP .
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This means that HTML and RDF need to be much more connected than many people expect. In fact I think that the two should never be separate and it’s not enough that you can publish RDF documents, you need to publish visible, browseable and engaging RDF that is meaningful to people. Tabular views are a weak substitute for a rich, readable description.

Ian mentions RDFa as one of the technologies aiming to build this bridge. And Benjamin Nowack responds by pointing out how RDFa plays nicely with the fragment identifier practice of the semantic web.