Comments on: Getting Semantic

By: The Social Graph – Bradley Holt

The Social Graph – Bradley Holt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:41:11 +0000

[…] my last post about the semantic web I mentioned the XFN project which allows individuals to define their relationships to others simply […]

By: bradley-holt

bradley-holt — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:04:00 +0000

@konterkariert As I said before, Microformats and RDF don't have the same scope and their goals are only somewhat overlapping. RDFa looks very interesting and an attempt at comparison to Microformats would show a few interesting differences. Microformats assert that metadata should be visible and it doesn't look like RDFa really cares about this one way or the other. RDFa is certainly more extensible than Microformats (again, the scope question) however I'd recommend checking out Poshformats.

Certainly more is possible with the Semantic Web (as defined by the W3C) than Microformats. I am very interested the W3C's Semantic Web vision and I think it will be very successful. However, I also believe that the semantic web (lower-case) is more likely to first become a mainstream reality through Microformats. Microformats provide a clear path to the semantic web from where we are now by using existing standards and encouraging best practices that web developers should be using anyways - mainly semantic (X)HTML.

By: konterkariert

konterkariert — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:28:00 +0000

Learn RDFa. RDFa is set to become the W3C’s standard for embedding metadata into web pages. This is the key to unlocking the true power of linked data. RDFa speaks the native tongue of the Semantic Web, RDF. This creates immediate benefits liked linked data, mixing vocubularies (think an artist music track and their FOAF file in one line) and creating custom vocabularies.

http://ysearchblog.com/2008/06/24/yahoo-chats-with-semantic-web-expert-ben-adida/

# What advantages does RDFa provide compared to microformats

Microformats fields can’t easily be shared across microformats, and all microformats must go through a centralized approval process to make sure no conflicts arise.

RDFa doesn’t have vocabulary conflicts: data fields, e.g. “title” can be reused by anyone, and there’s never any confusion as to what a given field means, since fields are, in fact, URLs. Entirely different types of data can share fields, which is exactly what applications need for extensibility. Multiple data items can be published on a single web page and, in contrast with microformats, relationships between the data items can be easily expressed.