WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010STUDY CASES ON THE CURRENT USE OFMICROFORMATSIasmina Ermalai and Radu Vasiu“Politehnica” University of TimisoaraBd. Vasile Parvan no 2, 300223, Timisoara, RomaniaABSTRACTMicroformats are simple standards used as frames for intelligently publishing content on the Web. They are considered tobe the lower case semantic web and they are designed for humans first and for machines second. These are the mainreasons why the number of web pages that have implemented merely hCard has surpassed 2 billion by the middle of2010. Nevertheless only a small number of universities have integrated no more than two of the most commonmicroformats (hCard and hCalendar) into their educational web portals. The present paper offers a perspective on thecurrent use of microformats.KEYWORDSSemantic Web, Microformats, hCard, hCalendar, eLearning1. INTRODUCTIONThe success of the Internet encouraged new forms of communication but even if its growth was exponential,it still remained mostly oriented towards the human reader. This is the reason why there is an urgent andcontinuous need for the automation of content processing on the Internet. Researchers and web enthusiastworldwide are trying to develop machines capable of understanding and processing data from the Web.Semantic Web is the next big thing and it has been like this for a few years now. According to SirTimothy Berners-Lee, Semantic Web is an extension of the current web, in which information receives a welldefined meaning, enhancing thus the communication between humans and machines (Berners-Lee, 2001). Inorder for the Semantic Web to be functional, computers must have access to collections of structuredinformation. The Semantic Web implies standardization and transformation of existing programs or agentsaccording to the new vocabularies. This is sometimes very difficult to initiate and accomplish, thus thedistrust of some IT experts (Downes, 2007).Microformats appear at this moment as a way of attenuating the gap between present and future web.They are designed for humans and machines both and they work with existing tools and on existing browsers.Microformats actually represent class names which enhance the semantic of web pages. Microformats aresimple, yet structured methods, based on existing standards (HTML and CSS) and used for adding moremeaning to web pages, in order to better indicate people, companies, events, reviews, tags, and so on (Lewis,2009) (Çelik, 2007).Despite the fact that best known web portals use microformats, universities worldwide appear to be quitereluctant when it comes to integrating microformats into their learning portals. Only a handful of universitiesuse hCard and hCalendar as tools for facilitating the administrative part of the learning process.The present paper aims to establish the current use of microformats both in educational, as well as in noneducationalweb portals.387