INTRODUCTION Whilst working on the new version of XHTML, as an Invited Expert on the W3C’s HTML Working Group, Mark Birbeck devised a new way of incorporating RDF into XHTML documents. Now called RDF/A, the proposal has been picked up and used by groups such as the IPTC (the standards body for news-related formats) and Creative Commons. It is also being worked on by the Semantic Web Best Practices Taskforce as a replacement for GRDDL.

A major motivation of the proposal was to have a syntax that was simpler than RDF/XML, and could be incorporated into any XML language, not just XHTML. This was achieved by using attributes—hence the name, RDF/A—which allows documents to be produced that are both readable by end users in a browser, and processable by metadata systems. This means that a user’s home page could also be their FoaF file, a company news page could be their RSS news feed, and so on.

The growth of interest in so-called microformats shows the there is a real need for, and interest in, such a solution. Unfortunately, microformats ultimately does not solve the problem, since firstly it requires already existing metadata formats to be redefined, and secondly uses unqualified tags.

AIM This session aims to provide an introduction to RDF/A, and will show how it can help attendees to publish metadata as easily as they publish any other type of information. Since the presenter is the person who devised RDF/A, attendees will also gain a useful insight into the problems that RDF/A aimed to solve.

STRUCTURE The session begins with a presentation of the problems that needed to be solved, and which therefore motivated the development of RDF/A, such as: the difficulty in using the RDF/XML syntax; the lack of adoption of RDF outside the highly skilled RDF community; the lack of a clear solution to the problem of incorporating RDF into XHTML; the resources needed to publish metadata alongside normal data.

The session then goes on to look at the language itself, and although it doesn’t aim to be a tutorial, it does introduce the major features.

The session then looks in detail at a number of real-world examples, showing how users can produce their own FoaF profile, calendar of events, RSS news feed, and so on, knowing little more than how to produce a document in HTML.