May 21, 2007

Want to Check Out RDFa in Under a Minute?

If you are curious about where microformats and metadata are headed (and haven't checked out RDFa), take a look at the W3C's RDFa in Javascript page. There, you'll find the RDFa Highlight bookmarklet. Save this to your bookmarks and then run it on a page that contains RDFa such as the RDFa Calendar Test Page. View source on that to see how the content is structured into data using some simple attributes.

The implications of standard, structured data that can be easily coded - and extracted - are simply huge. Imagine if, without too much additional effort, the blog entries and other kinds of simple web content that you regularly post could be easily mashed up, aggregated, or saved into local apps.

To understand more, check out Elias Torres' excellent and brief write-up of his Open Data in HTML presentation at XTech 2007.

March 25, 2007

Mind Map Interchange

Eric Blue is looking for a standard format for mind maps:

In an upcoming post I'm going to go into a little more detail on what this format should look like, and what technology would be the best fit (XML, JSON, RDF, N3?). In the meantime, I'm eager to hear some feedback:

* Is the need for a new standard an accurate observation?

* What needs to take place in order to make this vision happen?

* Who needs to adopt this format first, and what will be the major motivators to make progress in this area?

Source: The Need for a Common Mind Map File Format

I would suggest checking out discussions concerning the intersection of topic maps and the semweb:
W3C: A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals and Living with topic maps and RDF.

Also, I would delve into the approaches for internal representation and storage used by Mindraider and Pragmatron.

July 26, 2006

Annotating with markup in wikis

Danny intrigued me with a snip of SemWiki syntax. I had not realized it, but the Semantic MediaWiki project has made a lot of progress toward offering a rapid-fire means to annotate content.

Take a look at Help for Annotation Markup to understand how this works in MediaWiki.

Corrib.org also has some good ideas in SemWikiSyntax.