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
Tags: attributes, HTML, Javascript, semantic web, semweb, w3c
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
Tags: data, search, search engines, semantic web, semantic web standards, semweb, Yahoo!
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
Tags: Javascript, Microformats, rdf, screenscraping, semweb, xml
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