The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Last Call Working Drafts:
* RDFa Core 1.1,
* RDFa Lite 1.1 and
* XHTML+RDFa 1.1.
Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice Web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.
Public reviews due by 21 February.
Official announcement at W3C.
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.
The RDFa Working Group has published two Second Last Call Working Drafts today – RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1.
The first Last Call period for RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1 was started in late October 2010 and extended two times at the request of reviewers and comment submitters in order to get as wide a review as possible. There was input from members of the WHAT Working Group, the HTML Working Group, long-time RDFa Community participants, people working on behalf of large national governments, large and small commercial implementers, and RDFa Processor implementers.
Due to the quality of comments, the RDFa Working Group re-worked various specifications and tightened up features and language that could have caused implementations to diverge. Specifically, work to clarify the error reporting mechanism, generic XML+RDFa processing rules, the initial subject of a document, the further deprecation of xmlns:, and a Processor Graph vocabulary were completed.
The group is asking for comments on these two documents from the public until April 21st 2011. The Candidate Recommendation phase is next, during which the newly updated RDFa Test Suite will be used to test RDFa 1.1 implementations. Once there are two or more interoperable implementations, the RDFa specifications will proceed on toward the final W3C Recommended Specification.
Today the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML2 Working Group published the W3C Recommendation RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. This specification allows publishers to express structured data on the Web within XHTML. This allows tools to read it, enabling a new world of user functionality, allowing users to transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience. For those looking for an introduction to the use of RDFa and some real-world examples, please consult the updated RDFa Primer. [W3C link]
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.
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 new edition of the RDFa Primer has been published. This brings it into line with the latest draft of the RDFa Syntax specification.
So, congrats to Leo and Richard: Cool URIs for the Semantic Web is a W3C Working Draft, now. They basically discuss URI design issue regarding both humans and machines. Why do we care? Well, let’s have a look into the document:
The solutions described in the following apply to deployment scenarios in which the RDF data and the HTML data is served separately, such as a standalone RDF/XML document along with an HTML document. The metadata can also be embedded in HTML, using technologies such as RDFa [...], microformats and other documents to which the GRDDL [...] mechanisms can be applied. In those cases the RDF data is extracted from the returned HTML document.
What is your opinion? Do you have practical experiences — that is: no toy setup 
— in designing URIs in an XHTML+RDFa environment?
