Scott Davis makes a case for metadata or semantic data, pointing out that it is currently used by major websites to improve their traffic or the rank of the pages searched. He is presenting the most common ways to add metadata to a document: RDFa and microformats.
In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2008, Stu Charlton discusses what the Semantic Web is, RDFa, large-scale adoption of Semantic Web, the SPARQL query language, implementing Semantic Web capabilities in an application, triple stores, and performing a Semantic Web query.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages content.
The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has recently posted drafts of its Ontology for Media Resource 1.0 and API for Media Resource 1.0 efforts. They have also updated the Use Cases document to reflect some of the intentions of these projects. The basic goal of the Working Group is to produce an API and domain model for handling the explosion of media content on the Web.
