Humans & machines: one of those love/hate stories

• Syntax - How you say something
• Semantics - Meanings behind what has been said
• I love books!
• I books!
• Communication needs to improve
• Solve: Machine adaptation

What's up with HTML?

• Capturing data in a most meaningful way (i.e. semantics, relationships, order)
• What about common patterns?

Where we are and where we would like to be

• From Web of documents to...
• Web of things/concepts (databases)

A way of thinking about data

• e.g. Photographs are images of some event in time
  • The event is located somewhere that we can map
  • The occurance of the event date/timestamp
  • Entities (i.e, humans, organizations, locations) in the image can be identified
  • Description of the event
  • Quick keywords

What's up with microformats?

• There are other approaches to the general problem (e.g. RDF, eRDF, RDFa) but ..
• microformats solve specific problems
• Built upon existing and widely adopted standards
• Visible vs. Hidden meta-data
• It is easy to implement microformats
• Microformats do it with class (really!) and other attributes.
• It is not rocket science

hCard markup example

                           http://csarven.ca/
                           Sarven 
                            Capadisli

hCard markup example

<div              > 
 <a                  href="http://csarven.ca/">
  <span                   >Sarven</span> 
  <span                    >Capadisli</span>
 </a>
</div>

hCard markup example

<div class="vcard"> 
 <a class="url fn n" href="http://csarven.ca/">
  <span class="given-name">Sarven</span> 
  <span class="family-name">Capadisli</span>
 </a>
</div>

hCard markup example

<div class="vcard">
 <a class="url fn n" href="http://csarven.ca/">
  <span class="given-name">Sarven</span> 
  <span class="family-name">Capadisli</span>
 </a>
</div>

Example: hCalendar

           http://csarven.ca/presentations/... 

                         Microformats at Transcontinental Media

    2008 January 24

Example: hCalendar

<ol                  >
 <li               >
  <a href="http://csarven.ca/presentations/..." 
                >
   <span                >Microformats at Transcontinental Media</span>

    2008 January 24

  </a>
 </li>
</ol>

Example: hCalendar

<ol class="vcalendar">
 <li class="vevent">
  <a href="http://csarven.ca/presentations/..." 
     class="url">
   <span class="summary">Microformats at Transcontinental Media</span>
   <abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-01-24T1200-05:00">
    2008 January 24
   </abbr>
  </a>
 </li>
</ol>

Example: hCalendar

<ol class="vcalendar">
 <li class="vevent">
  <a href="http://csarven.ca/presentations/..." 
     class="url">
   <span class="summary">Microformats at Transcontinental Media</span>
   <abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-01-24T1200-05:00">
    2008 January 24
   </abbr>
  </a>
 </li>
</ol>

Tools

• Operator
• Tails

Cool stuff

• Combine information - mashups (powerful stuff)
• Show me a map of each news story
• Accidental API
• Subscribing to structured content
• Search!
• microformats -> GRDDL -> RDF (awesome!)
• DataPortability.org

Cost and benefits

• Open community development
• Observing common formats in our documents
• Easy to implement
• Standardised documents
• Reuse
• ...?

Adaptation

• Document links
• Browser extensions
• Tools
• Services
• Use in projects
• ...?

Good development process

• Communication and sharing
  • Managing projects
  • Information architecture
  • Development
  • Content editorial
• ~~ flow ~~

Microformats Community

• IRC
  • irc.freenode.net #microformats
    • great place to lurk and learn
• Email
  • join microformats-discuss mailing list
  • public archives
• Blog
  • tag posts with "microformats" tag
• Wiki
  • if you find errors, please fix them, like Wikipedia
  • advocate microformats support on sites you use
  • add examples, help research, brainstorm, etc.
  • help translate!

Colophon

• XHTML
• CSS
• S5 v1.1xoxo
• XOXO
• hCard
• hCalendar
• rel="license"
• Some rights reserved. CC by-3.0

Thanks!

• microformats.org

• csarven.ca/presentations/microformats-01
• csarven.ca/microformats-introduction