New primer introduces Web authors to using RDFa metadata in XHTML

Are you interested in putting your site on the Semantic Web but don’t know how to start?

Steven Pemberton of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Netherlands’ Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica has put together a primer for you.

His RDFa for HTML Authors, published on-line today (May 14), introduces the practice of embedding semantic data in Web pages and offers examples.

The primer’s introduction provides a good description of RDFa:

RDFa is a thin layer of markup you can add to your web pages that makes them understandable for machines as well as people. You could describe it as a CSS for meaning. By adding it, browsers, search engines, and other software can understand more about the pages, and in so doing offer more services or better results for the user. For instance, if a browser knows that a page is about an event such as a conference, it can offer to add it to your calendar, show it on a map, locate hotels or flights, or any number of other things.

Pemberton’s document also touches on Resource Description Framework and compact uniform resource identifiers.

It notes that RDFa allows authors to do more than include metadata about the Web page it’s contained in. Indeed, RDFa can be used to talk about other documents, people, places, and things.

On May 12, Google announced its search engine is phasing in support for microformats and RDFa.

The W3C’s RDFa Primer offers another introduction to using RDFa in XHTML.

You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.