Microformats and the Semanitc Web

Today was interesting, there was a bit of sparing going on between the Semantic Web and Microformats. While all in good fun, it did make me think a lot about perceptions.

It felt like even though it had clearly been said that Microformats was better presented and marketed, people still wanted it to be ‘better’ than Semantic Web technology. The technology arguments mostly melted away in a sea of perceptions and confusion.

The solution that Tom Morris and I have decided to pursue is a very siloed version of the Semantic Web. We aim to remove a lot of the stigma associated with Semantic Web complexity by choosing a small subset to work with. It’s been said that Microformats does 80% of cases, well we want to make an RDF based equivalent covering those same cases.

Our solution will require some serious branding. I thought the name Macroformats might work quite nicely. However we have also banned any names based on acronyms from being involved. Other than that lots of sexy logos Web 2.0 and rounded corners so add some ‘bling’. We plan to limit the scope to simple cases that are easy to use and apply. This will make the concepts very accessible. This isn’t different from Microformats, it’s just doing the same thing in a way which opens it up with the power of RDF.

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