I personally think that this marks the start of “real world” adoption of semweb, be it through a surrogate approach via microformats.
Why now? Because improved representation of your content in Google is simply too big to ignore. If embedding microformatted content (or, hopefully, RDFa) brings you an advantage in Google Page Rank, web site owners and SEO specialists will rapidly adopt the technology. Without the google index incentive this never would happen.

The other side may be that data quality gets diluted in a way. Up till now we are used to working with reasonably clean and consistent collections (like DBpedia, MusicBrainz to name a few), where the data quality matters all by itself. That is radically different from entering some code for the purpose of cranking up your rank on the search engines.

Maybe in a year from now we are all busy with implementing trust- and reputation systems for linked data instead of spreading the word. I’m curious if the nature of linked data makes this job any easier than with the unstructured web of documents.

Update: Ivan Hermann tells it all in a nutshell: RDFa, Google.

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This whole movement has led to another change as well. That is, as I see it, people getting to finally understand what the meaning of the original HTML specification was all about: it is the semantics, not the presentation in the first place.

In short, that specification meant to say that a <h1> element should convey the meaning of a top/document title, followed hierarchically by <h2> for chapter titles, <h3> for subtitles and <h4> for section titles and so on. Thus a <p> marked a paragraph, and more interesting, things like <cite> would mark a literal citation. This is called semantic markup.

So far so good, the resulting presentation in the browsers of those days was very bland and we needed a more sexy look for marketing purposes. Thus the markup was pushed towards the presentational limits – presentational markup indeed, where elements were used for their look, rather than their semantic meaning. A <blockquote> element no longer meant some sort of citation, but rather an indented paragraph of text. HTML itsel suffered from presentational elements as well: the <b>old tag and the <i>talics define presentation. For meaning, we have <strong> (rendered as bold type) and <em>phasis (rendered in italics). Quite a mess.

OK, so right now, the POSH movement has come to life. Where POSH stands for Plain Old Semantic Html. It all originated from within the Microformats movement, but discussions on the mailing list indicate that most microformat advocates think of POSH as being not related to microformats in general.

And I agree. Sure, good to see semantic correct use of html on the web, but this approach is way too simple in general to extract real meaning. If the web only existed of sceintific papers and novels, then maybe we could rely on the stricture of html as originally specified. And write a GRDDL transformation, which then says as much as: this <blockquote> is a citation of something else. Of what exactly, would still be left up for guessing.

All in all, using POSH wherever you can is good practice. But this has almost nothing to do with real semantic web. And could someone please help me to explain what the semantic meaning of <strong> versus <em>phasis is?

To finish with a famous qoute:

[Solutions should be] as simple as possible, but no simpler.

– Albert Einstein.

[ratings]

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