- From: Janet Daly <janet@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 09:57:37 -0400
- To: w3c-news@w3.org
Today, the World Wide Web Consortium forged an important link between
Semantic Web and microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource
Descriptions from Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced
"griddle"), software can automatically extract information from
structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Those
accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML
can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to
the Semantic Web, at very low cost. For more information, please
contact Janet Daly <janet@w3.org> at +1 617 253 5884, or the W3C
Communications Team representative in your region.
World Wide Web Consortium Releases First Version of GRDDL Specification
GRDDL Links the Semantic Web and Microformats
Web resources:
This press release
in English: http://www.w3.org/2006/10/grddl-pressrelease.html.en
in French: http://www.w3.org/2006/10/grddl-pressrelease.html.fr
in Japanese: http://www.w3.org/2006/10/grddl-pressrelease.html.ja
"Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages" or GRDDL
Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-grddl-20061024/
Primer: http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-primer/
Use Cases: http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-scenarios/
W3C's Semantic Web Activity
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
Microformats
http://www.microformats.org
http://www.w3.org/ -- 24 October 2006 -- Today, the World Wide Web
Consortium forged an important link between Semantic Web and
microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from
Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced "griddle"), software can
automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make
it part of the Semantic Web. Those accustomed to expressing
structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the
value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at
very low cost.
W3C invites community review of this First Public Working Draft,
published by the GRDDL Working Group.
Different Needs, Different Ways to Express Data
One aspect of recent developments some people call "Web 2.0" involves
applications based on combining — in "mash-ups" — various types of
data that are spread all around on the Web. A number of active
communities innovating on the Web share the goal of sharing data such
as calendar information, contact information, and geopositioning
information. These communities have developed diverse social
practices and technologies that satisfy their particular needs. For
instance, search engines have had great success using statistical
methods while people who share photos have found it useful to tag
their photos manually with short text labels. Much of this work can
be captured via "microformats". Microformats refer to sets of simple,
open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards,
including HTML, CSS and XML.
This wave of activity has direct connections to the essence of the
Semantic Web. The Semantic Web-based communities have pursued ways to
improve the quality and availability of data on the Web, making it
possible for more intensive data-integration and more diverse
applications that can scale to the size of the Web and allow even
more powerful mash-ups. The Web-based set of standards that supports
this work is known as the Semantic Web stack. The foundations of the
Semantic Web stack meet the requirements for formality of some
applications such as managing bank statements, or combining volumes
of medical data.
Each approach to "getting your data out there" has its place. But why
limit yourself to just one approach if you can benefit, at low cost,
from more than one? As microformats users consider more uses that
require data modeling, or validation, how can they take advantage of
their existing data in more formal applications?
A Bridge from Flexible Web Applications to the Semantic Web
GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such
as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the
data they wish to share into a format that can be used and
transformed again for more rigorous applications.
The recently published GRDDL Use Cases provides insight into why this
is useful through a number of scenarios, including scheduling a
meeting, comparing information from various retailers before making a
purchase, and extracting information from wikis to facilitate e-
learning. Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged
with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly
exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion
to other formats.
The GRDDL Primer shows several practical examples of "how to GRDDL"
an ordinary XHTML document that uses microformats. The practical
impact on current authoring practices of adopting GRDDL is minor;
only small changes are required to existing documents. GRDDL is thus
ready to deploy, at very low cost.
Contact Americas, Australia --
Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe, Africa and the Middle East --
Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
Contact Asia --
Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170
About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium
where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work
together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission
through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to
ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are
Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the
USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
(ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan,and has
additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http://
www.w3.org/
Received on Tuesday, 24 October 2006 13:57:52 UTC