The new version of the Open Document Format, ODF 1.2, has been ratified as a standard. One of the changes to ODF 1.2 is the adoption of RDFa as a way of including metadata. Read more at the ODF technical committee chair’s blog.
Archive for the ‘Implementations’ Category
This happened some time ago, but we forgot to mention it. Flickr expresses information about images and the licenses associated with those images using RDFa. In fact, Flickr was one of the first services to adopt RDFa and use it to express metadata about the contents of the web page.
Since so many sites use Drupal as their content management system (including the Whitehouse, the BBC, Ubuntu, CNN, NATO and Amnesty International, and, well, so many others) we can expect to see RDFa appearing on many new sites in the near future.
The long-awaited Drupal 7 is on its way. Beta 1 has just been announced.
Dries Buytaert discussed integrating RDFa into Drupal in Drupal, the semantic web and search, and shortly after that a a roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7 was published. Since so many sites use Drupal as their content management system (including the Whitehouse, the BBC, Ubuntu, CNN, NATO and Amnesty International, and, well, so many others) we can expect to see RDFa appearing on many new sites in the near future.
Toby Inkster has created a new RDFa checker, available here: check.rdfa.info
It checks RDFa 1.0 and the work-in-progress RDFa 1.1, extracts the RDF from pages, and also checks for the Facebook, Google, and CCrel uses of RDFa.
It looks like the O’Reilly product catalog uses RDFa. Check out this Nikon D5000 Manual. Looks like the GoodRelations schema, and quite a bit of data. We’ve long suspected that, once big consumers of web content started looking for certain RDFa vocabularies (i.e. Google and GoodRelations), there would be an uptick in RDFa production. Looks like this is indeed happening.
Check out the PLoS Journals, like PLoS Medicine or PLoS Genetics, and you’ll find RDFa for all bibliographic information, including authors, categories, etc.
Yahoo’s SearchMonkey work continues with some serious updates. We note in particular that, if you have a product to sell, the only way to mark it up is with RDFa. When you need fine-grained, dense structured data, it looks like RDFa is the clear choice.
Google just announced support for RDFa, starting with product reviews. Here’s Google’s FAQ on adding RDFa to your pages. This is a significant new direction for Google, where they will start looking at explicit data structure and provide enhanced search results accordingly. It’s fantastic to see them using RDFa for this task. It’s also fantastic to see them encouraging the use of a non-Google-branded vocabulary: open-vocabulary.org. Generic, reusable vocabularies built by industry groups, that’s exactly what we were hoping for with RDFa.
The side story here is that this was basically a Google-driven project from the start: they didn’t need the RDFa task force to create their vocabularies, to figure out how to mark up their pages, etc. Folks on the RDFa task force are finding out about this just now, as it happens. And we like it that way. RDFa is meant for communities of all sizes to mark up their pages, without centralized process overhead. Both Yahoo and Google’s RDFa launches were achieved without consultation with the RDFa community, and I consider that a success.
UPDATE: Google provides more details on RDFa for its rich snippets feature.
UPDATE 2: W3C blogs about the great news for structured web data.
Stephane Corlosquet has posted a video shown at DrupalCon this month demonstrating things you can do with RDFa and Drupal. Dries Buytaert (creator of Drupal) writes about it here.
