Like everyone involved in RDFa, I love seeing people use it to express information about themselves, using vCards, FOAF relationships, event information and so on. This type of information is often the first to get processed by new semantic technologies such as RDFa.
But to be honest, this is simple stuff. The real meat of RDFa is to be able to express much more complex collections of information, using nothing more than the tools of web-publishing.
So I was pleased to stumble across a blog post about an impressive use of RDFa — a large XHTML document, containing lots of information about ancient ceramics.
It seems that archealogical information collection at Ilion (the ancient name for Troy) is being collated in a database called GRBPIllion (which stands for Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion). As with any project of this scale, a key issue is how to make the information — such as descriptions, categorisations, drawings and photographs — available to as many people as possible.
After all, exciting as many of the finds are, there are also many fields in which this kind of information could lead to new theories or discoveries that are one step removed from the original find, and it’s exciting to see that RDFa may help in the publication of this data.
The blog post in question is called RDFa at Ilion.
“RDFa helps bloggers and website authors make their web pages smarter by adding computer-readable information to a site. RFDa provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. Elias Torres and Ben Adida discuss RFDa, including its history, what problems it is meant to solve, and the technical details of how it works.”
ITConversations
Well, we didn’t expect the discussion to start so soon, but it did, and there’s a lot of discussion happening on the mailing lists. Samuel Santos blogs about it and points out Manu’s great summary:
There is a lot of momentum around Semantic Web and RDFa.
This may be caused by the big milestone reached for RDFa, a Candidate Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing.
[...]
While I was pretty aware of the Microformats activity, I can’t say the same about RDFa. But Manu Sporny makes it a lot easier. In fact, this is by far the most comprehensive explanation of RDFa that I have ever seen.
Over at the Yahoo Search Blog there is an interview with Ben Adida on RDFa, its development, and its future.
Mark Birbeck recently gave a Tech Talk at Google on the subject of RDFa. The talk begins with a detailed introduction to RDFa, and then looks at how RDFa can play a role in improving search, as well as enhancing the way that users can view information. A video of the talk is now available online.
A nice outline of metadata in HTML including SHOE, microformats, eRDF, and RDFa in the context of searching based on annotated Web content is available at ReadWriteWeb: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey by Alex Iskold.
There was lots of talk about RDFa at the XTech conference. Amongst the attendees was Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage, who recorded some talks, and interviewed some attendees, including:
- Steven Pemberton’s talk Why You Should Have a Website, which covers reasons for needing RDFa
- An interview with Mark Birbeck on XForms and RDFa
- An interview with Steven Pemberton and Michael Smith on directions the Web is taking, including discussions on RDFa, in two parts: part 1 and part 2.
Digg’s RDFa support is covered in BetaNews. Bob DuCharme is quoted, and the RDFa highlighter is referenced.
A new edition of the RDFa Primer has been published. This brings it into line with the latest draft of the RDFa Syntax specification.
Just found out about RDFa from the Yahoo announcement? Read the Primer and have some questions? Deploying RDFa on your web site and want some guidance with specific examples? We’ve got a new mailing list for you:
public-rdfa@w3.org
You can find subscription information and full archives at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/.
Or, if you prefer to lurk for now, subscribe to the RSS feed.
(If you’re developing an RDFa parser, have a Last Call comment on the RDFa Syntax, or want to discuss some deeply technical aspect of RDFa, you should feel free to email the task force at its existing address: public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org.)
