Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Mark Birbeck – Marking up content with RDFa

Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 9 10.45am.

Presentation slides

Session description

RDFa is at the cornerstone of the Browser Web and the Semantic Web. With RDFa, publishing data becomes as easy as publishing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and leverage all the URI-based data integration features brought by Semantic Web and Linking Open Data technologies.
In this introductory session primarily directed at those who author web content, Mark will touch a range of RDFa topics from its goals and how it came about, to its relationship to linked data and how it’s being used in some recent projects for UK Government web-sites.

One of the main reasons why interest is growing fast in RDFa is because the prospect for being able to extend documents without having recourse to standards organisations is enormous. Mark will explain how the RDFa task force has managed to provide extension points to a base language as a mean to break the perpetual cycle of guessing in advance which new language features are sought by authors.

About Mark Birbeck

Mark Birbeck PortraitMark Birbeck is the managing director of webBackplane. He has been creating software for many years, and his particular interests are the semantic web, and components that help to create dynamic, flexible, user interfaces. He has consulted, given training, spoken at conferences, and contributed to books and articles on these and other topics. He is also heavily involved in the creation of new standards on these themes.

An Invited Expert at the W3C since 2003, Mark has also edited multiple W3C technical reports and publications for both the XForms Working Group and the XHTML 2 Working Group. Over the years his work there has included devising and proposing RDFa and Compact URIs.

Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarkBirbeck

delivering year round learning for front end and full stack professionals

Learn more about us

Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development

Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney