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Web3.0 (The Semantic Web) building blocks

Mar 14

After our last discussion about Web3.0 or if you prefer, the Semantic Web, I had frequent discussions with Charl about microformats (he is the maven on this subject!). Microformats can be considered one of the building blocks on which Web3.0 is being built.

Microformats is:

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set
of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted
standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats
intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors
and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).”

Now that I’ve confused the crap out of you, let me quickly explain in plain old english what it is and what you can do with it.

Lets look at a quick example. Lets suppose the Geek/27 dinners announce a dinner that is going to happen on a specific date at a specific place in a month’s time. They go on their wiki page or on their web site and announce it. Instead of simply typing up the details on the page, they mark it up a little based on the hCalendar and hCard formats. The hCalendar format will “explain” the details of the dinner event while the hCard will “explain” who I can contact where about the event. It will still look EXACTLY the same as it looks now on the wiki page.
The difference is because they have marked it up based on the particular microformat standards, I can have a Firefox plug-in that will recognize the data and extract the details from the page without me having to do the ol’ copy-n-paste thing. So my plug-in extracts the event data (the where, when, what, etc…) and show it in my sidebar. From my sidebar I can now take the data and simply import it into my calendar and take the organizer’s details and import it into my email client’s addressbook. (Lets say you will right-click on the event data and say “Schedule in calendar” and it will save the event data to your calendar and the same with the organizer’s details)

The basic idea is that data can be recognized by software. In the old days (well, today still. We are still living in the old days, I suppose! ) people use to do “screen-scrapes”. They would write software that would parse a web page and try to predict what data/text on the page is the relevant data they want. With microformats implemented, it would not be necessary. Your browser will know which is the relevant data by simply parsing the page. So it would not matter how your page is laid out and designed, the software will know what data is a microformat and what is not, because it is marked up that way.

So how do you “mark it up”? Here is a hCalendar example:

<div class=”vevent” id=”hcalendar-27-dinner”>

<a class=”url” href=”http://27dinner.pbwiki.com”>

<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20070427T1900+0200″>April 27th 7pm</abbr>,

<abbr class=”dtend” title=”20070428T2359+0200″> 11:59pm 2007</abbr> —

<span class=”summary”>27 dinner</span>— at

<span class=”location”>Relish Bar</span>

</a>

<div class=”description”>27 dinner is about blah blah blah…

Dave is going to talk about This and That.

Vincent will explain what Web 3.0 is</div>

<p style=”font-size: smaller;”>This

<a href=”http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar”>hCalendar event</a> brought to you by the

<a href=”http://microformats.org/code/hcalendar/creator”>hCalendar Creator</a>.

</p>

</div>

As you can see it is plain old (X)HTML. Nothing special. Due to attributes that is added like id=”hcalendar-27-dinner” and class=”location” and class=”description”, the data gets defined and will enable software to “recognize” the data and use it to integrate it with other software.

Oh, and this is not the only thing that Web3.0 is about. Its one of the things. (just so we’re clear…)
Oh, note to Vincent: I’m starting to warm up to labelling it Web 3.0!