RDFa

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.)

As announced by Yahoo! yesterday, they will support soon semantic technologies:

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

You may also want to learn from Dave how to Preparing your sites for the data web. This really rocks!

The title says it all: RDFa.info now has a wiki. Please come along and join in the fun!

Christopher St. John is suggesting getting together for a RDFa-outreach dinner in Dallas sometime over the next week or so in combination with the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) conference. If you are interested, drop him a line.