Pipe dreams
Arfon Smith

Semantic Web

Sharing data with machines

Sharing data with machines

How’s it going?

Standards

RDF
Resource Description Framework

OWL
Web Ontology Language

SPARQL
SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language

DAML+OIL
DARPA Agent Markup Language - Ontology Inference Layer

FOAF
Friend of a Friend

The list goes on...

Semantic web: Hook together
disparate resources

Biology?

Hard enough to get any data on the
web, let alone another format

Complicated

Schemas
Resource descriptions
Declarative logic
Cooridination numbers
Ontology definitions
Design by committee

“it is miraculous enough to get them to
work with well formatted HTML”
Ian Mulvany, Nature & Connotea

Huge overheads

Provide two resources

Another way?

microformats.org

Why Microformats?

Build on existing data

Simple to create

Simple to consume

Firefox: Operator, Tails
Firefox 3, IE 8, Safari, Opera
hKit Text::Microformat MOFO

Microformats
hCalendar hResume
hAtom geo
XOXO adr
XFN
hReview citation
hCard

Microformats and Biology?

How do you integrate existing
biological web resources?

hAction, a microformat for biology

Hook together existing biological
web resources

Demo

Proof of concept

Pipes for biology

\"Hey, that's pretty awesome.\"
Chris Wanstrath, MOFO author

bioformats.org