Reiser 2.0

Microformat – the Roadmap to Semantic Web ?

Microformat – the Roadmap to Semantic Web ??

The Internet community really likes to idea and opportunities of Semantic technologies but are pretty reluctant to implement a fully fledged Semantic Web Infrastructure

Why ?

Lets look at the current Semantic Web perception

• Semantic Web is complex

• needs a lot of ontology work before you can start building something useful

• needs a lot of base infrastructure (Triple store, RDF bus, Ontology Management etc.)

• has no prove of scalability

• What is the business case ???

• etc.

While I agree with some of the arguments (e.g. complexity) I strongly believe that the Semantic Web has huge potential and
will revolutionize the Web by adding semantic context to future web applications.

But is there a way to start small and simple?

The answer is YES and the technology is called Microformat

Microformat are designed for humans first and machines second and are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. .
(See http://microformats.org/about for more details)

or in simple words: Microformat is a way to embed Semantics into XHMTL.

The advantages of Microformat are:

• pre-defined vocabulary

  • People & organization -> hcard

  • Calendar & events -> hcalendar

  • Tags, Keywords, Categories -> htags

  • etc ( http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page)

• very easy to implement ( It took us a couple of hours to add Microformat support to our CE 2.0 stack)

• easy way to dynamically build mashup services based on Microformat

Microformat have a lot of momentum and gain rapid support from big companies

Examples:

• Yahoo! applications such as Flickr, upcoming.org, and Tech or LinkedIn are already exposing their data in microformats

• New startups are using Microformats for dynamic mashup builder e.g. http://www.teqlo.com

• Microformats are also used by Microsoft's live clipboard.

• IBM is using microformats in there QEDWiki

• There are plugins for Firefox that recognize Microformats and do pretty interesting things with them (such as "add to calendar"

  • http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator

  • http://www.whymicroformats.com/webcards/index.html

   

and last but not least there are already some “bridges” from Microformat to RDF

http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec

http://dannyayers.com/2005/08/01/microformats-on-the-grddl/

A special thanks to Jiri Kopsa who educated me a lot on Microformat!

Technorati Tags: web2.0 CE2.0 microformat semantic web

Posted at 02:29PM Apr 17, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Web 2.0  |  Comments[3]