Structured data in HTML5 and WikiData

Ten HTML5 Drafts Updated

29 March 2012

The HTML Working Group has published ten updated working drafts. Two documents that hold special interest in the light of WikiData project are HTML+RDFa 1.1 and HTML Microdata. Both are ways of marking up HTML so that you can easily extract semantic data and relationships.

So how does that relate to WikiData?
  • Wiki Markup is a higher level markup than HTML and Wiki Data is a subset of the larger Web Data
  • While WikiData is a controlled experiment to enrich wiki information, HTML RDFa is a broader attempt to mark up the entire web of data
  • Enriching WikiMarkup with Semantic Markup may be one method of increasing semantically marked content.
  • The current approach of WikiData seems to be to provide forms to fill and make the meta (semantic) markup invisible. This is a good bootstrapping strategy. There is nothing similar in the Web Content world. Web Content Creation/Editing tools may be able to borrow some ideas from the WikiData experiment.
  • It will be interesting to watch how things play out. WikiData seems to be on tight deadlines (significant demonstration of technologies by end of 2012).

be interested in the “HTML Data Guide��? document, that details and compares the various approaches, or the “RDFa Lite 1.1 specification,��? that provides a minimal, entry level subset of RDFa.