There are a lot of different ways to connect the dots of content and data
that comprise the Web. Two of them are microformats
Both approaches have attempted to make sense of content by making use
of metadata descriptors, but they differ somewhat. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is trying to change that.
“Microformats and the Semantic Web always had a lot in common at a high
level, but GRDDL fills in a few technical details so that they interoperate
at a practical, running-code level,” Dan Connolly, the W3C GRDDL Working
Group staff contact, told InternetNews.com.
HTML has a special “profile” hook to use
While microformats use XHTML and HTML, GRDDL (pronounced “griddle”) extracts RDF
(Resource Description Framework) data from XML so that it can be transformed
or understood by other applications in a mashup or other application
settings.
The way that GRDDL will work with microformats will require some effort from
microformat authors.
“Microformat authors that want their data to integrate seamlessly with
other semantic Web data should use well-formed XHTML and profile URIs,”
Connolly explained. “For example, the dbpedia project takes millions of
facts from Wikipedia and exports them using URIs and RDF and SPARQL.”
Connolly explained that the HTML specification lets authors use any name
they like for conventions for class, as well as rel attribute values for styling and
other processing. The conventional microformat names are hcard, hcalendar,
summary and description, among others.
a URI to take those document-local conventions and share them in the Web.
Some microformat documents use the profile hook, but not all do.
GRDDL links the profile documents to XSLT
transformations that allow machines to exploit microformats and other syntax
conventions.
The GRDDL specification has been under review for nearly a year. Connolly noted that early adopters have been participating in working out the kinks and finishing the test suite.
“At this point, the design has been through the entire W3C process, and it is
stable and ready for widespread deployment,” Connolly said.
So what’s next for GRDDL?
“What’s next is to tweak flight itineraries and soccer schedules so that I
can stop copying them by hand, one field a time, and start letting the
computer manage the data for me,” Connolly said. “That’s what GRDDL and microformats and RDF and URIs are all about.”
