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There have been general BarCamps aplenty, but this one, arranged by Semantic evangelist Tom Morris, was geared specifically towards the Semantic (and semantic) Web.

It had a slightly different feel to it, in that we didn’t stay overnight. But it was good to see some different faces in the crowd than the usual BarCamp suspects – there seemed to be a good few academics in the mix this time.

Session 1 – Accessibility
Jonathan Chetwynd

Current UK research tells us that 20-25% of the population suffer from “functional illiteracy”! The tools available for making sites all require significant literacy skills. So it is difficult for low-literacy people to access/make sites themselves.

JobCentre Plus – low literacy is strongly correlated with unemployment. The site for searching for jobs isn’t friendly for low literacy users – they encounter lots of check boxes and job titles.

GUI with graphics can be a better way of presenting things to low-literacy users. Currently, SVG not very supported by browsers at present and there is no easy accessible SVG authoring tool.

Another friend of mine, Antonia Hyde, is heavily involved with producing websites for people with learning disabilities over at United Response, and so this would have been a great session for her to attend.

Session 2 – Bringing Semantic Web to Bloggers
Jure Čuhalev

Jure demonstrated a product from Zemanta, a startup from Slovenia.  It empowers bloggers to write better posts. Plugin to Blogger etc – which gives you extra media content relevent to stuff as you write. Point and click on relevent article from list – gets added to bottom of code. Quick links for Technorati etc.

Focus is not on readers with widgets but authors with tools – via Firefox extensions or IE plugins (if Blogger etc does not support plugins). Free. Basic functions are free, upgraded functions for a small fee.

3rd party developers – get full API docs, support, promotion, it’s all open sourced stuff. Should be available from mid-March 2008.

Session 3 – hAvatar
Cristiano Betta

hAvatar – what is it? Instead of using 3rd party to host avatar, use a photo from your own site’s hCard. Made by Alper.nl as a plugin for WordPress. Goes and fetches the photo from your own site’s hCard to show as humbnails on comments etc.

Problems – if there’s multiple hCards on the provided URL, which to use? Can hack to see if any of the hCards have the URL specified which you’ve just looked at. Web service available at

http://alper.nl/cgi-bin/OpenAvatar.py?openid=http://yoursite.com/pictureurl

More info in Cristiano’s blog post, or download the plugin here.

Session 4 – Microformats “State of the Nation”
Ben Ward and Frances Berrmian.

A quick session from Ben and Frances about the current state of play with Microformats:

• Google – maps has hCard in the info bubble and sidebar stuff.
• The common formats have been widely adopted. Newer ones are being tested in the wild.
• hRecipes – marking up food!
• hAudio – development for over a year. Means of marking up music references. Could be used by last.fm and Songbird.
• Google Social Graph API – indexes XFN and hCards – give them a URL and it brings back a list of your XFN contacts

Then we decided to head for a curry before I eventually ended up in an extremely orange room at the easyHotel Kensington for the night.

Discovering Microformats
For viewing Microformats, and discovering them in a web page, I’ve blogged about Tails for Firefox in the past. But recently, I’ve been beta testing Andy Mitchell’s excellent Webcards 0.3 extension for Firefox. So what does it do?

The first time you load a page containing Microformatted information, the green WebCards ribbon pops up at the bottom of the browser viewport to alert you. This also appears when you mouse over the bottom of the browser:

[WebCards ribbon tells you what sort of Microformats are in the page]

Playing Tag
Clicking the “Tags” link in the ribbon brings up the Tags panel:

[Default view of the "tags" panel is the Related option, allowing easy search of del.icio.us or Upcoming for the tags in question; "brian suda" in this example.]

Similarly, clicking the Feedback or Media icons gives alternative search options for that tag:

[Feedback offers to search Technorati, Media offers to search Flickr for the tag in question]

An alternate way to access the tags panel is to right click any tag on the page (which will be highlighted by the green icon):

[Right-click (configurable) the TAG icon to get a floating version of the Tags panel]

Making Contact
When displaying contact information, the extension will display the blue icon whenever it encounters any hCard info. Right click to get the floating panel for the hCard information:

[Default view for hCard is the Information icon. Shows multiple links if they are in the hCard]

The Application icon will allow export of the hCard info to Outlook or other address book application. The Related icon shows other search options for that person:

[Related search options are LinkedIn, Google or Wikipedia]

Getting Friendly
My blogroll is marked up with XFN and when you mouse over the relevant link, WebCards will let you see the orange icon. Right click and it shows relationship in the XFN panel:

[The XFN panel shows the page owner's relationship to the linked person]

Make A Date
The last major category of Microformat that I’ve been exploring with WebCards is of course, hCalendar. These are indicated by the little red icon:

[Upcoming occasions displayed in the Calendar panel]

As with the other format panels, the Application icon lets you export the event to Outlook or Google Calendar applications; Related will search Upcoming or Google for the event:

[Add an event to my GoogleCalendar with the Applications i
con]

Summing Up
So far, I’ve seen several iterations of this extension, and Andy has always welcomed feedback on the app. I like it a lot better than Tails for Firefox, it just seems to do more and looks much nicer – don’t accuse me of being shallow, it just adds up to a nicer user experience! Anyway, I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking to get the most out of Microformats in the wild.

One of the presentations that I missed at BarCampLondon2 (I was attending another session) was a light-hearted debate about the similarities and differences between Microformats and RDF. The main protagonists were:

• Jeremy Keith and Brian Suda in the Microformats corner
• Tom Hughes-Croucher, Tom Morris and Ian Forrester in the RDF corner.

Thankfully, for those who didn’t see the debate, Ian has uploaded a video of the session. It makes interesting viewing! And shortly afterwards, I found Ben Ward’s insightful post about the whole subject too. I think Ben’s second paragraph hits the nail on the head:

The thing about RDF is that no-one has yet demonstrated any real-world reason to care about it. It fascinates academics who would love — just for the sake of it — to model the entire universe in triples but in the real world of web browsers the value has never really been promoted.

Spot on.

The Microformats advocates have been very quick to explain what they are for, what they do, and how to implement them. I use them regularly in this blog, and try to incorporate them wherever I can into new projects. It’s so easy to build them in from scratch when marking up events (hCalendar), people (XFN) or contact details (hCard).

But as yet, I’m really stumped as to what RDF – or more importantly, eRDF can do for me. Tom Morris has started a website called GetSemantic which hopes to chart the progress of developments about eRDF and spread the word. I’ll be keeping an eye on it from time to time, to see what’s cooking, but until then, I’ll be sticking to my diet of Microformats.