Linked Data and RDFa in US and UK government web-sites

And finally, I find this announcement exciting because the guidelines document uses the term 'Linked Data' throughout. This reflects an extremely deep understanding of the implications of what COI are doing with RDFa; the COI do not simply explain to people how to publish vacancies and consultations to the web -- they are describing how to publish that data to the Linked Data cloud.

Read more in Linked Data and RDFa in US and UK government web-sites, at my webBackplane blog.

Understanding the XForms dependency engine

A key component of any XForms processor is the dependency-engine. The idea is pretty straightforward, and will be familiar to anyone who has used a spreadsheet; if some item has its value set by a calculated expression that contains references to other items, then when any of those items change, the first item must be recalculated.

Read more in my introductory article on the XForms Developer Zone site, Understanding the XForms dependency-engine.

RDFa Tech Talk, at Google, 2009

Although my talk Beyond Web 2.0 -- How RDFa Can Help to Democratise Data on the Web, took place back in June, it's only just now been made available online, due to technical problems.

(I should say too, that those same technical problems also mean that the video is in 50's style black and white; maybe it gives it a bit more authority.)

I really enjoyed the session, and you'll hear at one point near the end I get to put some questions to Othar Hansson and Kavi Goel, and the rest of the Rich Snippets team, about how they'll be using RDFa going forwards.

Read more at RDFa Tech Talk, at Google, 2009 on my webBackplane blog.

XForms Developer Zone and User Group launched

We're pleased to be launching two new initiatives to help people who are interested in XForms.

The first is the all new XForms Developer Zone web-site -- or xformsdz, as we're calling it.

Whilst the Developer Zone will be unashamedly biased towards XForms, within that, we'll have discussions, articles, code snippets, and tutorials about any XForms processor we can find, and any application framework in which it's used.

To accompany the web-site, we're also launching a regular newsletter, and a London XForms User Group.

Read more at XForms Developer Zone and User Group launched on my webBackplane blog.

Tokenising the semantic web

To summarise the argument; first, we know that we need to be able to tokenise URIs, because they tend to be long and unwieldy. However, whilst the current use of prefixes to abbreviate URIs is useful, it only allows us to tokenise URIs that are used to identify vocabularies, and not full URIs. It's also not ideal that these prefixes are being expressed using a document architecture mechanism -- @xmlns.

By adding a new attribute -- @token -- to the CURIE processing rules, we can tokenise full URIs, which gives authors the same level of simplicity that Microformats has. The key difference though, is that this tokenisation is completely scaleable, and so overcomes one of the major drawbacks of Microformats.

Read more at Tokenising the semantic web on my webBackplane blog.

More RDFa goodness from UK government web-sites

With my semweb consultantancy hat on, I've been working for a few months now on a number of RDFa projects with the UK's Central Office of Information. These projects have generally followed the same pattern:

• define a vocabulary for some specific area of interest, such as job vacancies or government consultations;
• use that vocabulary in HTML pages, via RDFa;
• get my colleagues at webBackplane to build a prototype application using Drupal and ARC2, that both publishes and consumes pages in the right format;
• add an application to Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey to process the RDFa pages.

A couple of days ago the UK Civil Service web-site was updated with a new look, and some exciting new features, some of which stem from the projects I've been involved in. There is still some more testing to do, so there haven't been any firm announcements yet, but I'm allowed to talk about one particular feature that is very exciting, the presence of RDFa in each of the job vacancies.

Read more at More RDFa goodness from UK government web-sites on my webBackplane blog.

RDFj: Semantic objects in JSON

"Essentially, what we've done with RDFj is to map JSON to RDF -- with a few extra tweaks thrown in -- rather than simply mapping RDF to JSON. (RDFa took the same approach, starting with HTML, and then working out what RDF various patterns might represent.)

"There are of course many uses for the straightforward serialisation approach, taken by RDF/JSON. But we're finding that as our applications increasingly use both JavaScript and RDF, it's very useful to blur the lines between the two. RDFj takes us an important step towards that."

Read more at RDFj: Semantic objects in JSON on my webBackplane blog.