RDFa and its use in Government

Mark Birbeck (webBackplane)

CSIRO ICT W3C Australia Office

DATE: 2009-10-07
TIME: 09:15:00 - 10:15:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
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ABSTRACT:
RDFa is a smarter and extensible method to sprinkle data or metadata in a web page based on RDF. It is also a cornerstone of future web standards mixing existing Browser Web and Semantic Web standards. With RDFa, publishing data becomes as easy as publishing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and leverage all the URI-based data integration features brought by Semantic Web and Linking Open Data technologies.

In this introductory session primarily directed at those who author web content, Mark will touch a range of RDFa topics from its goals and how it came about, to its relationship to linked data and how it's being used in some recent projects for UK Government web-sites. One of the main reasons why interest is growing fast in RDFa is because the prospect for being able to extend documents without having recourse to standards organisations is enormous. Mark will explain how the RDFa task force has managed to provide extension points to a base language as a mean to break the perpetual cycle of guessing in advance which new language features are sought by authors. Mark will also discuss his work with the UK Government Central Office of Information, an end-to-end implementation of RDFa to aggregate all public sector vacancies sourced from the web sites managed by the different agencies. He will explain how the addition of RDFa to the agency-published job ads web pages can be done without forcing the agencies to change the look of their web sites. He will use this example to describe why semantic web languages can offer a more precise way to annotate and leverage the content of the original web pages and eventually facilitate the development of the aggregation and search capability of the central web site.
BIO:
Mark Birbeck has been a software developer for many years and is the managing director of webBackplane, a UK company. An Invited Expert at the W3C since 2003, Mark has edited and authored multiple W3C technical reports and publications. His original interest in RDF and his involvement in the XForms working group have led him to develop an extension of XHTML2 for the publication of RDF data in web pages, and to design a simpler way to put user interfaces and semantics together. He has devised the original RDFa specification and is actively involved in all the follow-up work at W3C required to upgrade existing standards such as SVG or HTML5.