The Open Geospatial Consortium reports that the organization has adopted Semantic annotations in OGC standards as an OGC Best Practice. The article states, “OGC standards provide standard ways of locating and transporting network-resident geospatial data and ways of locating and invoking geospatial services. Without proper descriptions of these resources, however, use of the resources is limited to small user groups. To make a geospatial resource more widely discoverable, assessable and useful, resource providers must annotate the resource with descriptive metadata that can be read and understood by a broad audience. Without such metadata, people will neither be able to find the resource using search engines nor will they be able to evaluate if the discovered resource satisfies their current information need.” Read more

Jeff Jaffe of the W3C reports, “HTML5 is the cornerstone of the Open Web Platform that the web community is building. This week saw two significant events in W3C that bolster our efforts… First, we announced that Adobe, Google, and Microsoft have provided significant funds to sponsor more complete W3C staff coverage to achieve Recommendation Status for HTML5 for 2014.”

He continues, “Second, the chairs announced people from the community chosen to participate in the editorial team to complete HTML5: Travis Leithead, Erika Doyle Navara, Ted O’Connor, and Silvia Pfeiffer; more names will follow. With these contributions of time and money from our Membership, we are confident that HTML5 is resourced to move forward. And we are pleased that the Working Group, in collaboration with others in the community, is also focused on what will come next – as web technology continues to be a living technology.” Read more

Gregg Kellogg has been working on a new RDFa test suite. He’s written a summary of his work to date on his blog. Kellogg states, “Recently, RDFa entered the Candidate Recommendation phase for releasing RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa 1.1 Lite, and XHTML+RDFa 1.1 as W3C Standards. I’ve been using RDFa for a couple of years, originally as part of the Connected Media Experience, and lately because I’ve become passionate about the Semantic Web. For the last 10 months, or so, this has extended to my becoming an Invited Expert in the W3C, where I’ve worked on RDFa, HTML microdata and JSON-LD.” Read more

Roy Tennant recently wrote an opinion piece declaring that microdata, not RDF, will power the semantic web. Needless to say, this stirred up some strong opinions in the comments. Tennant writes, “While RDF is complex, and designed to be implemented as a stand-alone depiction of metadata, it does have an implementation that is designed for embedding in web pages: RDFa. On the other hand, microdata is relatively simple and solely designed to be embedded in web pages. While the metadata cognoscenti are in the RDF camp, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have thrown their lot in with microdata by launching the Schema.org effort. Were I a betting man, I wouldn’t be backing RDF at this point.”

As we reported in November, schema.org has indicated support for both microdata and RDFa. Read more

Evan Sandhaus reports for the New York Times that rNews has finally arrived. He explains, “On January 23rd, 2012, The Times made a subtle change to articles published on nytimes.com. We rolled out phase one of our implementation of rNews – a new standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into HTML documents. Many of our users will never see the change but the change will likely impact how they experience the news. Far beneath the surface of nytimes.com lurk the databases — databases of articles, metadata and images, databases that took tremendous effort to develop, databases that the world only glimpses through the dark lens of HTML.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum recently wrote an article on the value of semantic web technologies, noting in particular the value of making semantic technologies common, coherent, and standard. Feigenbaum writes, “Semantic Web technologies are broadly applicable to many, many different use cases. People use them to publish pricing data online, to uncover market opportunities, to integrate data in the bowels of corporate IT, to open government data, to promote structured scientific discourse, to build open social networks, to reform supply chain inefficiencies, to search employee skill sets, and to accomplish about ten thousand other tasks.” Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that it expects HTML 5 to reach “recommendation” status in 2014. The goal sets a potentially enormous milestone for the semantic web. According to Ian Jacobs, head of communications at W3C, “If you invest the term ‘standard’ with seriousness, you need interoperability, and testing is a part of that.” Read more