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The primary issue I set out to discuss was the state of RDF vocabularies for microformats. Why is this important? A growing number of tools exist that convert microformats into RDF but in case everyone chooses different representations it will be significantly more difficult to interoperate. So in a small group we set out to document what we believe are the best practice mappings from microformats to RDF.

Have you been over hearing people talk about microformats and thought to yourself "what are those?" In this post I provide a quick introduction, and discuss the various ways that microformats are changing the Web.

If Firefox 3 is potentially going to ship with native support for microformat detection, then a very important initial question becomes "which ones?"

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

Over 10 billion pieces of reusable information can already be found across 100 million web pages which embed RDF and Microformats. Start consuming this data today with Sindice Data Web services.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML. DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed. DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use. DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results

Open, distributed, social. * About The DiSo Project * Blog * Links * Chat About The DiSo Project Silo free living. Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee * zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out".

An Explosion of RSS Icons

RDFa ("Resource Description Framework in attributes") is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with "rich snippets." Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before.

Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called "Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0", where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web "dead". Let me explain what I mean.

XFML lets you exchange hierarchical faceted metadata. It also lets you indicate topics in different published XFML documents are equal, thus allowing you to reuse indexing efforts. XFML borrows many ideas from Topicmaps, a format you should check out if you like the ideas behind XFML but are frustrated with its limitations (see http://topicmaps.org).

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read.

Data portability is the ability for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications. The DataPortability Project works to advance this vision by identifying, contextualizing and promoting efforts in the space.