TAG announces completion of work on Microdata/RDFa

This is a (somewhat belated) formal announcement of the TAG's resolution 
[1] that "The [...] product page at 
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/products/htmldata.html is agreed as the basis on 
which the TAG closes out it's work on Microdata/RDFa coordination". Quoting 
the salient points from that page [2]:

==================

Background
----------

The TAG's HTML5 Last Call Review resulted in the TAG raising issues on 
microdata and RDFa Last Call Working Drafts. The TAG recommended that the 
W3C set up a Task Force to investigate whether the languages could be 
brought together, or to aid users (both publishers and consumers) in 
understanding the strengths and weaknesses and to ease transitions between 
the syntaxes.

Results
-------

Following the TAG's note, several of the issues that led to the TAG's 
comments were addressed or raised by individuals as bugs or issues on 
microdata or RDFa. For example, the mapping from microdata to RDF in the 
microdata specification was removed. RDFa 1.1 Lite was also announced.

Following discussions with key players, the HTML Data Task Force began in 
mid September and was limited to a technical analysis of the relationships 
between microdata, RDFa and microformats with the goals of:

    * raising bugs where incompatibilities could be
      reduced through spec changes

    *  documenting guidance for publishers and
       consumers of these formats

    * drafting mappings that help consumers
      merge data from different formats

Discussions took place on the public-html-data-tf@w3.org mailing list and 
were captured in the wiki [3], which continues to be available for the 
community to capture best practice in the use of HTML data.

The HTML Data Task Force identified a number of issues to ease the 
alignment of microdata and RDFa. Most of these were raised as bugs on the 
relevant specifications.

Two SWIG Notes were created by the Task Force:

     * HTML Data Guide [4] which provides a guide
       to choosing between and using microformats,
       microdata and RDFa individually and together

     * Microdata to RDF : Transformation from
       HTML+Microdata to RDF [5] which provides
       guidance on extracting RDF from microdata

It is hoped that the Microdata to RDF Working Draft will be taken forward 
to Recommendation when microdata moves forward to Recommendation status, 
but at this time there is no Working Group in a position to do this.

The TAG will continue to monitor developments in HTML data, but has no 
specific further actions planned.

==================

Thanks especially to TAG member Jeni Tennison, who did most of the TAG's 
work on this project.

Noah Mendelsohn
Chair: W3C Technical Architecture Group

P.S. Tracker: this fulfills TAG ACTION-664



[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2012/01/19-minutes.html#item05
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/products/htmldata-2012-04-23.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/wiki/Html-data-tf
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/html-data-guide/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata-rdf/

Received on Monday, 23 April 2012 19:14:47 UTC