I’ve been making a real effort to understand and implement semantically meaningful code into the websites that I build, in a belief in the greater vision for a Semantic Web. The Semantic Web, as defined by W3C, “provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.” Right now, most websites are built in a way that is readable by humans, but not so much by machines. In my understanding, the main goal of the Semantic Web movement is to express data on the Web not only in natural, expressive language (i.e., I went to the store on the corner today), but also in a format that can be read by software agents, (i.e., [Adam Parks, web designer in Brooklyn, NY] went to the [pharmacy located at 41.23245, 73.24233] on [20071024T141213-0800]). That data is then accessible, and usable, by other computers, and servable by those computers to other people.

I just recently finished reading Microformats by John Allsop. Microformats are “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” They are a way for the the programming-challenged amongst us to markup our websites in meaningful ways. An example is hCard, which is a way to markup contact information so that it can be read and parsed by computers and downloaded directly into Outlook or Address Book. You can see them in action in the “Add to Address Book” link on my contact page.

Today, I read an article on Read/Write Web about a new feature from Adaptive Blue called SmartLinks. SmartLinks can automatically bring up semantic information about links to books, music, movies and more with just a line of Javascript. I immediately set it up on all my blog and What I’ve Been... pages. Just click on the little blue square next to the links. It’s really great to see such a concise, easily implementable solution—definitely one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” ideas.