Microformats The Next(Small)Thing on the Semantic Web? Center for E-Business Technology Seoul...

MicroformatsMicroformatsThe Next(Small)Thing on the The Next(Small)Thing on the Semantic Web?Semantic Web?

Center for E-Business TechnologySeoul National University

Seoul, Korea

Rohit KhareIEEE Internet Computing, 2006

Presented by Nam, Kwang HyunIntelligent Database Systems LabSchool of Computer Science & EngineeringSeoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Copyright 2008 by CEBT

ContentsContents

Microformats

XHTML

The Lowercase Semantic Web

Unlocking XHTML’s Power

The h* Effect

Thinking about Linking

Microstandards?

Random Mutations

Context-Aware Personalization - 2


Microformats (1/6)Microformats (1/6)

Microformats

A set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards

A way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

Intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns

– E.g. XHTML, blogging

Enable the publishing of higher substantial information on the Web, providing the fastest and simplest way to support feeds and APIs for website.




Microformats are:

A way of thinking about data

Design principles for formats

Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns

Highly correlated with semantic XHTML

A set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.

All the above.




Microformats are not:

A new language

Infinitely extensible and open-ended

An attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools

A whole new approach that throws away what already works today

A panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions

Defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean

Any of the above




The microformats principles

solve a specific problem

start as simple as possible

design for humans first, machines second

reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards

modularity / embeddability

enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services




XHTML and HTML standards allow for semantics to be embedded and encoded within the attributes of markup tags.

Microformats take advantage of these standards by indicating the presence of metadata using the following attributes

Class

Rel

Rev (in one case, otherwise deprecated in microformats)





<div> <div>Joe Doe</div> <div>The Example Company</div> <div>604-555-1234</div> <a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a> </div>

<div> <div>Joe Doe</div> <div>The Example Company</div> <div>604-555-1234</div> <a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a> </div>

<div class="vcard“> <div class=“fn“>Joe Doe</div> <div class="org“>The Example Company</div> <div class="tel“>604-555-1234</div> <a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a> </div>

<div class="vcard“> <div class=“fn“>Joe Doe</div> <div class="org“>The Example Company</div> <div class="tel“>604-555-1234</div> <a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a> </div>

With hCard microformat markup


XHTMLXHTML

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language)

A markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax

Because they need to be well-formed, true XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using standard XML tools

It can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML.



The Lowercase Semantic WebThe Lowercase Semantic Web

Suppose you wanted to publicize an upcoming lecture

vCalendar

A widely acclaimed international standard that thoroughly addresses such calendaring and scheduling concerns


BEGIN:VCALENDARBEGIN:VEVENTSUMMARY:Microformats: What the Hell Are They \and Why Should I Care?DTSTART:20050926T000000ZLOCATION:Balder Room…END:VEVENTEND:VCALENDAR



RDF Calendar

A better alternative for use with the Semantic Web

– Today’s machines prefer angle brackets to colon-delimited header-value pairs.


<rdf:RDF … > <Vcalendar> … <method>PUBLISH</method> <component> … <dtstart rdf:parseType=’Resource’> <dateTime>2005-09-26T00:00:00Z </dateTime> </dtstart> …



Both of these alternatives must be

stored as external resources

hyperlinked into the original Web page from HTML anchor text


<a href=“/myEvent.vcs”> <b>Microformats: What the Hell Are They and WhyShould I Care?</b> <p>Ryan King will explain why microformats areimportant and how you can mark up specific kinds ofcontent in ways that make it easier for the right peopleto find your stuff.</p> <small>September 25th, 2005, 5-6PM in the <i>Balder Room</i></small></a>



Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)

Simpler, more flexible, and more accessible than relying on such relics of the ‘browser wars’ as <small>

We could use an external stylesheet to define each string’s look and feel

The payoff for choosing the class names that they eliminate the need for linking to an external representation in the first place

The inline style information is as sufficient as the other formats for encoding the same information


<div class=“vcalendar vevent”> <span class=“summary”>Microformats: What theHell Are They and Why Should I Care?</span> <p class=“description”>…</p> <abbr class=“dtstart” title=“20050926T050000-0700”>September 25th, 2005, 5</abbr> …</div>


Unlocking XHTML’s PowerUnlocking XHTML’s Power

When XML was new, CSS was scarce, and the browser wars raged, HTML was often cast as a hopeless muddle.

HTML grew up and became a proper XML application, XHTML, offering all the rigor and modularization that an information architect could ask for.

Technologically, XHTML class attributes do add a critical degree of freedom, insofar as they can accommodate multiple values in space-separated lists.

Socially, The key insight that the microformats community is taking advantage of is ‘appealing to authority’

Stealing selector names outright from well-established standards rather than reinventing the wheel



The h* EffectThe h* Effect

The h* effect underscores the philosophy of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”

Shorthand for several design principles that contrast strongly with existing standards bodies and processes

Reduce

The microformats community and process

– Serves to focus attention on a specific problem

“How can we point to licensing terms for blog posts?”

– Favors the simplest solutions



The h* EffectThe h* Effect

Reuse

Work from experience and favor examples of current practice

The key point of departure with the Semantic Web community

– “design for humans first, machines second”

Recycle

Encourage modularity and the ability to embed

Valid XHTML can be reused in blog posts, RSS feeds, and anywhere else you can access the web



Thinking about LinkingThinking about Linking

The most successful microformat of all is “Tagging”

‘Web 2.0’ enthusiasm for tags can be traced to the del.icio.us shared bookmarking service.

Users started choosing tags that weren’t just keywords but also labeled groups and roles

By surfacing, or displaying, items to which other users have applied the same tag

By suggesting additional tags for a given item, tags power an exciting bottom-up process for collaboratively organizing information

Flickr.com tagged photographs in the same way.




Microformat adoption rate

Blog posters adopted the relTag microformat extremely rapidly


By adding rel="tag" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink

is an author-designated "tag"

By adding rel="tag" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink

is an author-designated "tag"



XHTML Friends Network (XFN)

A simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks

It took the approach of adding link relationships to existing blogrolls


A list of blogs that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs

A list of blogs that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs


Microstandards?Microstandards?

Standards on which microformats build

XHTML depends on XML

The compound microformats for semistructured data reuse the simpler elemental microformats



Random MutationsRandom Mutations

Structured blogging embeds plain XML within <script> tags

Then uses additional Dynamic HTML techniques to present it to end users via browsers.

Advantage

Complete decentralization for creating new vocabularies, with an additional level of schema constraints for enumerated values and other basic data types

Disadvantage

The semistructured information is invisible to ordinary browsers and screen readers for the disables

It creates less incentive for modularization and sharing of common vocabularies



Random MutationsRandom Mutations

The structured blogging forces all the structured information on a Web page into a single ‘ghetto’

An island of XML within the larger HTML document

However, microformats can be added to more complex HTML structures

Table layouts for agenda grids

Formatted presentation of bibliographic records


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Microformats The Next(Small)Thing on the Semantic Web? Center for E-Business Technology Seoul...

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