Aarron Walter » Microformats

Tim Berners-Lee Video: The Semantic Web

Aarron — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:33:59 +0000

I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web, speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition as Berners-Lee had originally dreamed.

The Semantic Web is all about expressing the meaning of our content through standardized markup, which is the mantra of any standardista. It’s more than communicating information hierarchy with heading tags. Semantics help us communicate the logic, context, and relationships of our data to computers so they can automate tasks or find important patterns that humans may have missed. On the Semantic Web a simple program could help employers locate the right talent for a project by search keywords in resumes of people near the company. It would also make it possible to automate the coordination of a complex event like a family reunion. If data such as personal schedules, contact information, and venue locations are presented in a standardized way, a program could read the data to identify the best date and location for the event then handle all of the invitations and RSPVs.

Beyond simplifying basic tasks, The Semantic Web could one day save millions of lives. Imagine a search spider that crawls the Web discovering medical ailments that are marked up in a standardized format. Common symptoms in a particular location could be identified and reported to medical experts who could immediately determine if the pattern is actually a dangerous pandemic. It would make it possible to irradiate deadly diseases before they spreads. The same technology could be turned on poverty, violence, genocide, and most any other major issue that plagues humanity.

It’s tragic that Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web is still so far off. The vast majority of content that is published online lacks structure or meaning, which makes it very difficult to find and even more difficult to elicit its meaning. Achieving the goal requires massive buy in from individuals, organizations, governments, and corporations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to publish your content semantically, and the idea is gaining some momentum. To learn more about the big ideas of the Semantic Web and what you can do to make your content semantically meaningful to computers check out this brilliant video: Intro to the Semantic Web.

Microformats Cheat Sheet

Aarron — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:52:58 +0000

Now that you are getting interested in implementing Microformats on your sites, you may find a cheat sheet of all major Microformats for fast reference a handy tool. Brian Suda, the author of this useful cheat sheet also wrote a book on Microformats, published by O’reilly. Think Vitamin reviewed the 45 page PDF book favorably.

Dreamweaver Extension for Microformats

Aarron — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 13:47:13 +0000

The Web Standards Project has assembled a Dreamweaver task force to try to lobby Adobe to better implement web standards in their software (although Dreamweaver has come a long way in this respect already). One useful outcome of their efforts is an extension for Dreamweaver that simplifies the implementation of Microformats. Microformats is one of the hottest buzzwords as of late, and for good reason. It’s goal is to standardize the way in which we use XHTML to markup information such as calendar events, contact information, etc. so we can build scripts and applications that can see the meaning in this content and do something useful with it. An example might be a community calendar application that could gather all events from sites that list events in a certain area. A program could not make any sense out of this content unless it had a standardized way of identifying each piece. To learn more, visit Microformats.org.

The Microformats extensions allows you to quickly markup contact info, events, references to friends/colleagues sites, and site licensing in this standardized format. Learning to do this on your own is also pretty easy, as Microformats uses XHTML tags you already know, but names classes for these tags according to the data it encloses. Once you install the extension, look at your Insert palette in Dreamweaver where you will find the Microformats menu item added.