RDFa

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.

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.

At the Xtech conference next week, Steven Pemberton will be presenting his paper “Why you should have a website”.

The talk discusses some of the inherent problems with Web 2.0, and how RDFa can be used to overcome them.

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At her talk SemWebbing the London Gazette at the forthcoming XTech conference, Jeni Tennison will explain how the London Gazette is adopting RDFa to semantically mark up their pages.

There’s an RDFa tutorial at WWW2008 in Beijing in just a few hours, with Ivan Herman, Elias Torres, and Ben Adida doing the teaching.

Manu Sporny has created an excellent RDFa tutorial video (8min, YouTube): RDFa Basics.

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Fabien Gandon has produced a great set of introductory RDFa slides. Here they are.

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At XTech 2007 in Paris, France, last week, Elias Torres presented one of the best talks on RDFa to date, Open Data in HTML, which was above all fascinating for the demonstration of how easy it was to add new actions to Michael Kaply and his RDFa addon to the Operator plugin for Firefox, and showing finding places on maps, adding events to a calendar and people to a contacts list from an RDFa-enhanced webpage.

There were several talks that included RDFa at the WWW Conference in Banff that ended recently. These included:

• Moving Stuff - Linking Desktops with semiBlog, the Semantic Clipboard and RDFa, by Knud Möller (DERI/NUIG).
• Bootstrapping the Semantic Web with GRDDL, Microformats, and RDFa, by Harry Halpin (U. of Edinburgh) and Fabien Gandon (INRIA)
• A grounded ontology for identity and reference of web resources, by Aldo Gangemi and Valentina Presutti (Laboratory for Applied Ontology National Research Council (ISTC-CNR))
• Deploying Web-scale Mash-ups by Linking Microformats and the Semantic Web, by Dan Connolly (MIT), Harry Halpin (University of Edinburgh), and Murray Maloney (Muzmo Inc.)
• xH: A Standards-based Web Application Programming Language, by Mark Birbeck (x-port.net)
• Atom Publishing with Apache Abdera, by Benjamin Szekely (IBM)

Harry Chen from Image Matters LLC gave an invited lecture in Tim Finin’s semantic web class. His topic was an introduction to Geospatial Semantic Web technology. Harry discussed the problems related with unstructured geo-data and showed how to resolve some of the issues using RDFa.