Chat with Semantic Web Expert Ben Adida by Yahoo,

RDFa launched!



Recently Yahoo chat had an interview with a web expert Ben adida. As Yahoo has announced its intentions to support semantic markups. Yahoo has continued to work with the best semantic markup community. Ben is a one among the faculty in Harvard Medical School and at the children's Hospital Informatics Program well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the Creative Commons representative to the W3C and chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force, focusing on bridging the semantic and clickable webs.


Ben was questioned as to RDFa has been long in the process of making and the reply was that the delay was for a good because they wanted enough flexibility in the data management which would be useful for current as well as future use.

Y!: What can I do with RDFa?
BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like:

* The title of a photo
* Your name and contact information
* The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3
* The ingredients of a cooking recipe
* The price of an item
* A gene on which you recently wrote a paper
* ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable

With RDFa, you can reuse existing concepts, e.g. the title and price of an item, no matter what that item is. If there's a field you need that doesn't exist, you can create it.

This level of granularity encourages you to mark up your content as fully as possible, while letting applications consume only as much of the data as it needs.
Micro formats, eRDF and AB meta and RDFa all serve the same goal.
The advantage which RDFa provides compared to microformats, eRDF and AB meta are that while Micro formats do possess field conflicts RDFa doesn't have field conflicts the titles can reused. As concerned with eRDF has much lesser data content than RDFa.
To the critics Ben says that it is a matter of finding the right compromise and he considers that RDF and eRDF have the same level of complexities as far as authors are concerned. It is more difficult to write RDFa than microformats but that is because microformats are limited in scope and microformats are quite costly to use. For few months They are looking forward to assist the publisher's to produce RDFa tool and the tool builders to parse it correctly.

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