A big milestone reached today for RDFa: we are now a candidate recommendation, which means it’s now a stable spec, ready for implementation. And of course, we already have a lot of implementations, so we expect this stage of the process to go well.
The Open Archives Initiative, which “develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content”, has just published support for RDFa.
Just a gentle reminder that the last call period for the RDFa Syntax document ends this week, Friday 21st March.
A new edition of the RDFa Primer has been published. This brings it into line with the latest draft of the RDFa Syntax specification.
The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML 2 Working Group of the W3C have jointly published the Last Call Working Draft of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. Comments are welcome through 21 March.
So, congrats to Leo and Richard: Cool URIs for the Semantic Web is a W3C Working Draft, now. They basically discuss URI design issue regarding both humans and machines. Why do we care? Well, let’s have a look into the document:
The solutions described in the following apply to deployment scenarios in which the RDF data and the HTML data is served separately, such as a standalone RDF/XML document along with an HTML document. The metadata can also be embedded in HTML, using technologies such as RDFa [...], microformats and other documents to which the GRDDL [...] mechanisms can be applied. In those cases the RDF data is extracted from the returned HTML document.
What is your opinion? Do you have practical experiences — that is: no toy setup 
— in designing URIs in an XHTML+RDFa environment?
We’ve reached a point where new editors’ drafts of the syntax and processing document, and an introductory primer are available, ready to be reviewed by the W3C’s Semantic Web Deployment Group at their next face-to-face meeting.
Take a look. RDFa is pretty close to completion…and now the fun can really begin.
Fresh from the Semantic Web Activity News: GRDDL is a W3C Recommendation.
As you might know, GRDDL can also be used to generate RDF from XHTML+RDFa documents. However, there are people around preferring to use RDFa rather directly
So, after some beta-testing, the W3C Markup Validation Service is now available in a stable version. This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, and: XHTML+RDFa … try it out!
In case you successfully pass the validation, you’ll be rewarded with an icon stating that you have produced valid XHTML + RDFa.
You can then choose between two versions:
or
PS: In case you need some material to play around, have a look at the RDFa Test Case repository.
Bruce D’Arcus announced in semantic-web@w3.org that the OASIS OpenDocument Metadata Subcommittee works on a proposal for enhanced metadata support in their file format:
A quick summary is that we’ve adopted RDF as the model for metadata, which can be:
- embedded as RDF/XML in the file package to describe either the document, or embedded content
- used in an RDFa-like syntax to tag content as triples (where the content is the literal object)
- hooked up to a new generic field (text:meta-field)
Note: For further discussions on this topic see also http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/.