RDFa

Over at the Yahoo Search Blog there is an interview with Ben Adida on RDFa, its development, and its future.

After the UK Government publication The London Gazette (published since 1665), which we have already reported on, the next UK Government site reported to use RDFa is the UK National Archive.

Another UK Government site is also soon to follow. Watch this space!

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.

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.

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.

A nice outline of metadata in HTML including SHOE, microformats, eRDF, and RDFa in the context of searching based on annotated Web content is available at ReadWriteWeb: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey by Alex Iskold.

I’ve written some thoughts on Yahoo’s SearchMonkey after having seen it live:

Yahoo recently announced SearchMonkey, and for the first time in 10 years, I have a reason to switch search engines, from Google to Yahoo (In fact, I just did that in Firefox.) Most web-savvy engineers know that online services succeed in big ways when they become platforms: when other developers can expand on the functionality in ways not foreseen by the original developers. Yahoo is the first to figure out how to do just that with a major search engine. With SearchMonkey, any developer gains the ability to provide custom ways of extracting and presenting page data within Yahoo search results.

[...]

And the best part is that Yahoo has separated data extraction from data presentation. Specifically, a data extractor for LinkedIn can produce RDFa, and different presentation applications can use different portions of that RDFa. If the extractor for Monster.com produces the same RDFa, then the same presentation application can be used to display both Monster.com and LinkedIn data. And if LinkedIn and Monster.com produce RDFa natively, within their web sites, then there’s no need to build data extraction… the presentation application can work natively on the raw web pages.

Check out SearchMonkey.

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.

Digg’s RDFa support is covered in BetaNews. Bob DuCharme is quoted, and the RDFa highlighter is referenced.

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.