Add Symantic Richness To Your Markup With (RDF) Ease is the title of an article on SitePoint that delves into a topic I find fascinating, yet have only dabbled in in my own website creations.

Microformats are one of the best ideas I have seen in web design since CSS.  RDF, in some form, is what the semantic web of the future will be built upon.  CSS, for all its complexity, is a powerful tool that is still growing into a transformative design language.

Read the article, even if parts of it are foreign to you.  Think about how this has the power to change the web as we know it.  Think about how it has the power to change our catalogs, our article databases, and online collections of resources (books, images, etc.).  Think about it.

GRDDL, a new recommendation from the W3C, is short for “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages”, a means by which software can extract semantic information from a variety of web pages.

In other words, rather than having to rely on the code (table structure, metadata, microformats, etc.) used by whoever created the page, GRDDL will attempt to align the content it finds with other existing data structures, and turns this into RDF. The content can then be compared and used with content from other sources.

For perhaps the best means of understanding how this can change the way we find and use information, check out the Scenarios that the W3C give as examples for how this could be used (scroll down to the various “Use Cases”).

I am a big fan of Microformats, and I see this a means to create a microformat checker service, similar to how web page creators can check their html/xhtml/css code. It would be neat to be able to run one’s pages against this in order to find out how best to structure and mark up the information contained within.

found on Catalogablog