RDFA : Weaving Richness and Meaning in the Web

The human web is reasonably well in hand by now. We are getting pretty good at building systems that people find valuable and entertaining. We have not spent as much time concerned about our software friends. There is a ton a rich content available on the web that is too difficult to extract in automated ways using just XHTML, the meta tag and microformats. This talk will introduce you to some emerging technologies from the Semantic Web camp to enrich your web pages with useful information for both automated extraction and improved browsing experiences.

Meta tags and microformats are useful but will only get us so far. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the metadata substrate of the Semantic Web that will take us to the next level of machine-processability and the Web. It allows you to express fairly arbitrary relationships about people, places, things, and content in an open world way. It is trivial to mix and match terms, vocabularies, etc. and to have a rich expressive capability not bound by the limitations of the relational data model and XML schemas. GRDDL is a technology for generating RDF metadata from content on demand. This can include XML documents, XML-RPC requests, XHTML pages, etc. The content could include authorship information, geotagging, creative commons license information, the topic of the document, etc. RDFa allows us to be more explicit about the metadata by embedding actual RDF relationships in our content. With technologies no more complicated than the presentation markup we are already using, you can imbue any web tier with extra semantic specialsauce that will benefit your users as well as help link you into the emerging Web of data.

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

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