Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla community.

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Three minutes into the video, a demo of Craigslist and mapping a number of rental unit addresses, and the note that this would take advantage of microformatted data, exactly like my own little project, Mapanui.

You can extend Ubiquity by writing your own commands (and share them with the world), using JavaScript. Ubiquity also uses the fab jQuery library (obviously) for rapid JavaScript development (though not using $ but jQuery for compatibility).

A nice push for microformats and an Open Web.

Something to keep an eye on, and look forward to full Firefox 4 integretion.

Category: Javascript, Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Aza Raskin, browser, firefox, Microformats, open Web APIs

Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:

LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.

Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to results using SearchMonkey widgets.

Yahoo SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

“Why the BBC removed microformat DateTime patterns from bbc.co.uk and what we are doing to bring them back.”

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Short and sweet: HTML 5 offers custom data attributes on HTML elements, intended to store custom data, which can then be handled on-page by JavaScript, or off-page by other (web-)applications.

John Resig discusses a number of useful benefits.

Category: Javascript, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: attributes, HTML, Javascript, semantic web, semweb, w3c

A couple of new, cool examples of SemWeb applications:

Pluribo, a Firefox plugin which creates instant summaries of Amazon user reviews. Some Amazon products have 10-100′s of reviews. Pluribo gives a summary by analyzing all these reviews. Currently only available for Amazon, you could see more, potential interactions with other web applications, think StructuredBlogging, or a summery of 100′s of comments on a blog post. Ars Technica has a nice overview.

HealthMap, a comprehensive mashup which ends up into a global disease alert map, on a country or province level. It filters disease news from Google News, the WHO and online discussion groups. Wired has more.

Category: Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Google, web applications, World Health Organization

The BBC is removing its Microformats support from its programmes page as they are having a number of concerns over hCalendar’s use of the abbreviation design pattern in regard to accessibility. But at the same time they are also looking into RDFa as a future replacement.

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: BBC, media, Microformats, rdfa

PodiPodi is a web-based command line interface like Quicksilver (on Mac) or Enso (on Win) for the desktop:

“A special widget which integrates a smart command line interface and a bunch of additional services directly into your website to perform common web-tasks”

PodiPodi offers an alternative UI to your website for power-users. By hitting a shortcut like Ctrl+z you get a jQuery powered command line widget which gives you additional information on the site, a sitemap, Flickr pictures, google search,… Have a play at their playground.

“PodiPodi” doesn’t really roll of the tongue very well though…

An alternative to PodiPodi (which requires web developers to integrate this into their site) could be a Firefox extention like Catalog which puts the same powerful command line interface under your fingers, but then for every webpage you visit. Unfortunately active development seem to be stalled.

Both apps show the power of extending your website under the hood, giving your visitors more power on how they navigate and use your website.

Category: Javascript, Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: cli, command line interface, Javascript, Microformats, web developers, web-tasks

Yahoo! Search announced that it will support semantic web standards, like Microformats, RDFa and Dublin Core:

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site.

By getting this out in the open, maybe other search engines (think “G”) might come out and proclaim their love for the semantic web?

You can try it out for yourself at Yahoo! Microsearch.

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: data, search, search engines, semantic web, semantic web standards, semweb, Yahoo!

POSH stands for Plain Old Semantic HTML, and lets face it, POSH sounds better than semantic HTML. Check out the POSH checklist.

Poshformats on the other hand are various data formats constructed by using common, semantic class names, which are less formal than microformats. Whenever some one or some organisation creates a common class name, this is considered a ‘poshformat’, like for example the hRelease for pressreleases, or MacroID, a small decentralized verifiable identity format.

Andy Clarke talks about meaningful mark-up over at StuffAndNonsense, on The Fine Art of Markup and discusses What’s in a name, covering the conventions webdevelopers use in naming their id’s for page elements (way back in 2004). So, do you follow convention?

Picture by kk+

Category: Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Andy Clarke, css, HTML, Microformats

HTML describes documents, and the link between documents.

We read these documents, we print them, bookmark them for later retrieval. We might copy/paste content into another document, constructing a new one.

If we wanted to automate this, we’d resort tot screen scraping. But this easily breaks, as there’s no standard or “contract” between the original site and the screen scraper.

Or we’d go for duplicating content into a new format like XML, with an agreed upon format. That way we could build product price aggregators using SOA Web Services with SOAP, WSDL,… Or use a REST architecture which takes us a bit closer back to our original HTTP request.

Most popular formats for sharing (XML) data is RSS and Atom, were again we duplicate the content we publish online.

But we’ve come a long way last couple of years, towards Web Standards, pushed by organisations like the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and Web Standards Group (WSG). They promote standards for separation of content, styling and behaviour, and the use of semantic HTML.

And then there’s the W3C, who promotes the Semantic Web as knowledge representation, using Resource Description Framework. RDF is a general method of modelling information making statements about resources in triples. Triples represent a subject-predicate-object expression, for example JJ – isBornIn – Belgium.

The W3C’s Web Ontology Language, or OWL, provides additional vocabulary and formal semantics, providing greater machine interpretability of Web content, but with added complexity.

But as of yet there isn’t much RDF data online, or ontologies are missing for many application domains. The W3C’s projects are rather academic, and aren’t close to any web developer’s mindset.

What is closer to the web developer though is semantic HTML, the correct use of heading levels and paragraphs to introduce structure, blockquotes and correct use of tables, for tabular data.

Now we add rich semantics, standardised Microformats. They are small pieces of metadata, within the markup, using CSS. They are discoverable, interpreted by machines.

Category: Javascript, Microformats, Semantic Web

Author: JJ Halans

Tags: Javascript, Microformats, rdf, screenscraping, semweb, xml