Re: microformats and semantic web?

iris garden wrote:

> Hi
>
> There is a new specification called microformats (microformats.org), 
> that use special tags to annotate part of an XHTML file, my question 
> is to what extent does this new initiative going to overlap with 
> semantic web grow?
>
> Thanks
> Iris
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Yahoo! Photos
> Ring in the New Year with Photo Calendars 
> <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/photos/*http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph//page?.file=calendar_splash.html&.dir=>. 
> Add photos, events, holidays, whatever. 

Annotea 
(http://kmi.open.ac.uk/events/usersweb/papers/01_koivunen_final.pdf) is 
based on Semantic Web and it has done annotations on parts of any XML 
resources by using XPointers to point to the exact context in the 
document for a long time (see slides 19-21 in 
http://www.w3.org/Talks/2001/1021-KCAP/slide19-0.html) . Additional 
checksums, using ids and CVS information etc. has also been discussed to 
make these pointers more robust when the documents change.

Based on discussions with users we started Annotea bookmarks and topics 
(a form of tagging, social bookmarks, and folksonomies based on Semantic 
Web) by just using the resource URI. However, from the beginning we also 
discussed and nothing really prevents from adding similar context 
property to bookmarks except at the time we felt the world was not yet 
ready for that. The context  would tell the location in the XML document 
but for a long time we also have had plans to extend the context for 
time codes for video and areas for bitmap images etc. Some of these 
extensions have been experimented by others as our resources have always 
been scarce.

So I do think that tagging and microformats can very well live in 
Semantic Web if done right. Annotea has all the basic means already.

Marja

Received on Thursday, 5 January 2006 14:45:13 UTC