Another step towards the semantic web

I co-organized the Web2.0 conference track that was held at Solutions Linux 2007 in Paris last week . Researching to prepare the talk I gave, I came accross microformats and GRDDL. Both try to add semantics on top of (X)HTML.

Microformats uses the class attribute and the "invisibility" of `div` and `span` to insert semantic information, as in ::

  <li class="vevent">
    <a class="url" href="http://www.solutionslinux.fr/">
     <span class="summary">Solutions Linux Web 2.0 Conference</span>: 
     <abbr class="dtstart" title="20070201T143000Z">February 1st 2:30pm</abbr>-
     <abbr class="dtend" title="20070201T18000Z">6pm</abbr>, at the 
     <span class="location">CNIT, La Défense</span>
    </a>
  </li>

GRDDL information is added to the `head` of the XHTML page and points to an XSL that can extract the information from the page and output it as RDF.

Another option is to add `link` to the `head` of the page, pointing to an alternate representations like a RDF formatted one.

Firefox has add-ons that help you spot semantic enabled web pages: Tails detects microformats and the semantic radar detects RDF. Operator is an option I found too invasive.

As for my talk, it involved demonstrating CubicWeb, the engine behind logilab.org, and querying the data stored at logilab.org to reuse it with Exhibit.