The Semantic Web and Microformats

The Semantic Web Syntax = how you say something – Letters, words, punctuation Semantics = meaning behind what you say – What the sentence actually means I Love Technology! I Technology Means the same so it’s semantically the same thing.

The Internet The internet gave voice to computers so they can speak to each other, but they don’t know what the meaning behind the words are. Computers MIMIC human information to each other

The Web Quick and easy way to retrieve and view information. Huge doc storage and retrieval system. When you enter a website address into your browser it sends a request to the website which retrieves it and sends back to your web browser. Written in HTML language which is a syntax the computer can understand. It tells the computer how to display the page to you.

Create a way to get any document on the internet Created a syntax HTML that displays any document to you

Internet + World Wide Web + Search Engines

The Problem is Syntax not Semantics Computers don’t understand the meaning behind the page they retrieve for us. If we can get computers to recognize what’s in a web page they could learn what we’re interested in and they can help us get what we want. This changes computers from passively helping us to actively helping us.

The Web Today… Is about documents The semantic web is about things… – People, places, events, movies, organizations…anything you can think of The semantic web is not only about pointing these things out to computers, but also about letting computers know how these things are related to each other.

Once a computer starts understanding what a person, place and event is, it can help you interact with these things. – A birthday party is marked up as an event with a date and a place and you can tell your computer to save the date in your calendar. Search engines become more accurate because you can say you are looking for a person, song, a place etc. The search engine refers you to a website based on the semantics not just key words.

A Web of Things There are several technologies that can embed semantics in html documents Microformats and RDFA See Add Microformats Magic to Your Site (page 37 of your book for URL)

Microformats Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Microformats allow content on a website to be ported to other applications with ease and understanding, resulting in increased use of the information they describe.

Ported to what? PDA’s, mobile phones, MP3 or online calendar Microformats serve as the API to the content of your site, providing unprecedented interoperability between platforms What does this have to do with Findability? – Well, when information is marked up so that it is portable, users can move it to a location where it won’t be lost. – It information where and when you want it.

How To you Mark Up a Microformat? What makes a microformat is a standardized series of tags and class names, which create a recognizable pattern of data containers that application can easily recognize. hCalendar = event data is hCard = event venue is hCard – contact information is Followed by markup using HTML.

Resources For Dreamweaver users - Microformat Cheat Sheet hCalendar Creator hCard Creator

To make the content portable you need a method for moving the data from the web page to the calendar or address book. You do this by adding links to Technorati, a microformat translation service It will convert your (x)html into a universal format that will download to the user’s preferred calendar and contact application ready for syncing with portable devices. Linking to the service with the URL to your page trailing, Technorati will convert your data into the appropriate universal format.

XFN, XHTML Friends Network XFN was introduced as a means of identifying relationships between people on the web. The premise is simple, by adding the rel” ” attribute to a hyperlink, you can describe your relationship to the person to whom you are linking. For example: Troyb.net To let your browser know that your page is XFN friendly, modify your as follows: – As more and more people follow this relationship building standard, the web will gain a meaningful and potentially very useful map of our human networks. This is just one small example of the potential power of a Semantic Web.

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