I have a very loose acquaintance, Harry Halpin, who I believe currently is working at Duke on something Important. He is widely referred to as the smartest person a person would know. He did his post-graduate work with the Semantic Web at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and I casually kept up with his work via his now dead blog and his ibiblio page. He also, at least he used to, chair(s|ed) the W3C Working Group on GRDDL. That’s a lot of introduction.
Anyway Harry’s work turned me onto some of the projects based on the idea of the Semantic Web. I checked out FOAF (a project that doesn’t seem to have a lot of traction) but it seemed to be too far out tech wise to be very utilitarian, despite some very half-assed support from LiveJournal.
Last night I had a mind change experience and I think that the Semantic Web is on the cusp of breaking out of ethereal nerd-hard dogma and into widespread practical use. This mind change was caused by my introduction to Microformats. Specifically Microformats and Oomph, or some other javascript library that will follow along shortly with increased adoption. Essentially this library and this specification allows you to place consumable interchange ready Calendar events and contacts into your web pages and allow users to directly lift the contact info off of your page and into their calendar and contacts manager (Outlook, Apple, Google, you name it). Thanks go to Larry Clarkin for his main topic presentation at IndyNDA for the tip off on this.
The way I understand it, Microformats are GRDDL, they are semantic web, they provide information about websites that isn’t locked into display. They have arrived.
I suggest you go read about it. I believe that it is the future.
P.S. I am considering moving to my own hosting for this blog which means I will be “switching blog software.” This will allow me to do things like post packages of my examples for you to consume at your leisure and also implement things like Microformats. The “switching of blog” software has been the mark of death for many a blog I’ve read, wish me luck.
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