Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Last week was a busy one on the semantic web front for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group published an updated Working Draft of Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Description Resources. The working group was chartered about a year ago to produce recommendations covering how groups of resources can be described and how the origin of those descriptions can be authenticated. Such resources can be described through the publication of machine-readable metadata, encapsulated by Description Resources (DRs).

According to the W3C, the latest draft describes how DRs can be created and published, how to link to DRs from other online resources, and how DRs may be authenticated and trusted. The aim is to provide a platform through which opinions, claims and assertions about online resources can be expressed by people and exchanged by machines, the W3 says.

There are some interesting motivators driving the development of POWDER. These use cases include:

Having an optimal web experience on a mobile phone, by showing search results in which the metadata associated with the links presented indicate conformance with mobileOK, a trustmark that can be applied to online content that meets criteria derived from the Mobile Web Best Practices;

Improving web functionality — for example, redirecting users on slow connections to a page of video clips that are more appropriate to stream at a lower bandwidth;

Improving the web experience for people with disabilities, via web search engines that can gather metadata about sites including their conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so that search results can be prioritized according to compliance with particular checkpoints of those guidelines; and even

Child protection. A network operator could, for example, have access to a metadata description from a web portal that indicates a particular site is associated with adult nudity. Should a child be sent a link to this site — and his parents have activated a feature from the network operator that lets them restrict the kind of content their children can view — the network operator will be able to block the child’s access to the site.

Also last week, the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML2 Working Group jointly published an updated Working Draft of the RDFa Primer 1.0. RDFa lets XHTML authors express the structured data in their web pages — calendar events, contact information, and so on — using existing XHTML attributes and a handful of new ones, paving the way for users to transfer structured data between applications and web sites. The rendered, hypertext data of XHTML is reused by the RDFa markup, so that publishers don’t need to repeat significant data in the document content, the working group says.

Earlier this month, the W3C had some additional news on the RDF front. It announced the W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group, sponsored by W3C Members Oracle, HP, PartnersHealthcare, and OpenLink Software. The group’s goals, it says, are to to examine and classify existing approaches to mapping relational data into RDF and assess whether standardization is possible and/or necessary in this area, and to examine and classify existing approaches to mapping OWL classes to relational data, or, more accurately, SQL queries, moving towards the goal of defining a standard in this area.

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