Tuesday, 5/22/2007
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Level: Technical - Intermediate

Microformats are a hot topic in Web 2.0 technology. They are small markup vocabularies designed for embedding in host document types such as HTML. They are highly focused on one class of information, such as personal relationships or categorization of links. They have strengths and weaknesses with regard to syntax and semantics. There are several approaches to Microformats and several technologies that can be used to augment Microformats, including RDF/A, GRDDL and plain old XML (POX). This presentation discusses the important technologies of interest to users of Microformats and how in practice to use them to bootstrap semantic applications. It covers:

• Brief description of Microformats, their strengths and weaknesses
• How to use GRDDL to populate a formal semantic model from Microformats
• How to use a combination of AJAX and links to plain XML, JSON or RDF for Microformats
• Validating Microformats and the importance of Microformat profiles

Uche Ogbuji is a computer engineer and enterprise data architect. He is a recognized expert in data design and distributed systems, pioneering techniques for integrating traditional enterprise systems with advanced Web technologies. He has worked with XML since 1998, RDF since 1999 and in Web Services since 2000. He co-develops 4Suite, an open-source platform for XML and RDF processing. He is lead designer of the Versa query language for RDF, and several other influential technical reports. He is a columnist for IBM developerWorks, Application Development Trends and XML.com. He has written almost 250 articles on XML, Web Services and RDF in recognized publications and speaks extensively at conferences worldwide. He received the 2003 ActiveState Active Award for outstanding contribution in the profession of software development in the topic of XSLT.