October 27, 2006

Today's Internet is a large amalgamation of sparsely interconnected pieces of information, riddled with content that is often disparate and not always easy to understand.

Connecting the many dots in a Semantic Web is the dream of Tim Berners Lee, the actual creator of the Web we know it today. With some help coming from the W3C GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) specification, Tim Berners Lee's Semantic Web takes a step closer to becoming a practical reality.

The resource descriptions from the GRDDL can be easily transformed or understood by other applications in an array or other Internet application settings. Technically, GRDDL will extract RDF (Resource Description Framework) data from XML. With the GRDDL mechanism in place, the XML namespace document declares that namespace associated documents or profiles include data that can be analyzed and stored for future use.

Overall, RDF is a W3C specification that was only completed in February 2004. GRDDL is the next layer allowing for RDF to be analyzed and manipulated to connect the Semantic Web together. While the regular Web is about exchanging documents, the Semantic Web is about the interchange of specific data.

The W3C has been working on GRDDL since at least April 2004 when it first released the GRDDL design as a W3C technical report. Recently, the W3C released the first version of the GRDDL specification. Although the Semantic Web and the GRDDL specification may seem somewhat abstract to the average person, the W3C has gone to great lengths to help users better understand what it's all about and the real-life examples where it will integrate itself.

To be sure, the W3C has published a GRDDL Primer and a collection of various examples on how to use GRDDL to extract RDF data from XML.

"The way in which GRDDL empowers authors of Web content can be considered somewhat analogous to allowing a non-native speaker to learn the spoken form of a new language first, before attempting to master its written form, rather than trying to learn both simultaneously," the GRDDL Primer states.

Dan Connolly, a member of the technical staff of the W3C, said that he expects Semantic Web software vendors and developers will learn about GRDDL fairly quickly so they can take advantage of the data from microformats and structured blogging. "I expect some microformats developers to learn more about the GRDDL specification and specific Semantic Web tools as they reach limitations of dealing with microformats one at a time and as the appeal of a consistent model for data across a variety of domains expands.

W3C is not quite done yet with GRDDL though. Currently it's only at the specification phase. "The Working Group is resolving technical issues and developing a test suite and tutorial materials," Connolly explained. "Our plan is to finish the W3C Recommendation process sometime in the first quarter of 2007, give or take" said Connolly.

Source: Internet News