Microformats

MICROFORMATS

What are microformats and why might we want them?

Word Count; 593, excluding headings and entries in the Bibliography.


Objective;

To make web site data more meaningful to machines


“Nowadays the volume of the information on the Web is increasing dramatically. Facilitating users to get useful information has become more and more important.”
[Lixin Han, Guihai Chen; 2006]

A critical flaw in the first inception of the web that it was designed primarily with people in mind. Web 1.0 was basically a publishing platform where the end user were the people deciphering the information presented on their screens. As the web grew, immense quantities of documents became available. This shear volume of information created a severe problem - cluttering.

“Users are not satisfied with the low precision and recall. With the emergence of the Semantic Web, this situation can be remarkably improved if machines could ‘understand’ the content of web pages.”
[Microformats Speed Access to Web Data]

This is the solution proposed by microformats, is to build on the existing resources by modifying the visibility of hosted information. In effect, tags are attached documents to aid the speedy recall of more valuable and relevant information.

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviours and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)
[Microformats: Paving the Cowpaths]

This is a particular format that can equally be interpreted by both man and machine.

Currently search engines such as Google, retrieve information based on the keyword entered into the search bar. They prioritise their findings based on the position of the key word within each result, i.e. presence of word in heading would be deemed significant. The frequency of the search word within the main body of the text in conjunction with the number of hits achieved provides the crude basis indicative of relevance,

“The widespread availability of machine understandable information on the Semantic Web offers some opportunities to improve traditional search. If machines could “understand” the content of web pages, searches with high precision and recall would be possible.”
[Lixin Han, Guihai Chen; 2006]

However, for a while ate least there exists a chicken and egg situation, nobody willing to exert additional effort in annotating posts without the technology in place to utilize them. While the web developers see no need to produce the mechanisms if there is little for them to search, this facility is near at hand although

Micro formatting exists on a limited scale today; bloggers were amongst the first to harness the capabilities of micro formatting earlier this year. Edgeio is a company that has taken the concept and developed it further. In a similar fashion to eBay they specialises in hosting classified adverts posted in the main by individuals. Its comparative advantage lies in the fact that the content of each is made searchable using microformats, enabling much more efficient detection of the item worldwide.

I feel that there is real potential for integration of this facility with the established capabilities of RSS. By setting boundaries or specific attributes regarding a product the user could simply sit back and wait for corresponding matches to be relayed back to their aggregator, as is the case for news items currently, genius! This new invention almost completely removing the efforts required in tracking down that perfect item.

The use of micro formats will structure the information on the web in a greatly more organised manner, making it infinitely more flexible, which in turn opens the door for a creative new array of applications, which can manipulate this data in any desired fashion.


Bibliography;

• The Big Picture on Microformats, John Allsopp, Published on August 28, 2006
• WHEN THE WEB STARTS THINKING FOR ITSELF, David Green. Information World Review. Oxford: Dec 2002., Iss. 186; pg. 37, 2 pgs
• Microformats: Paving the Cowpaths, http://www.windley.com/archives/2005/07/microformats.shtml
•
MICROFORMATS SPEED ACCESS TO WEB DATA, IT Week, September 18, 2006
•
Microformats go mainstream, a shel of my former self, June 24, 2006 Saturday 11:46 PM EST
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3232
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web