WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010Figure 1. hCard versus hCalendar in educational portalsWe used black for hCard and gray for hCalendar. In the case of a University using both of the mentionedmicroformats, we included that university in the hCard, as well as in the hCalendar numbers.Universities used hCard for the following:- publishing solely the institution’s address (they only used the hCard’s adr class) - 23% of the wholemicroformats’ use;- publishing staff information and also the institution’s address – 40% of the total microformats’ usein educational institutions.The first implementation allows students to localize the institution on digital maps, while the second oneoffers the facility of exporting or saving the contact information in different other programs.hCalendar holds 37% of the microformats’ educational market and universities generally use it forpublishing information regarding the timetable. Using a plug-in, students can save this information into theirdigital agendas.In 2009, the “Politehnica” University of Timisoara has also implemented microformats in the DistanceLearning Centre’s portal. The novelty resided in the fact that, besides the two microformats mentioned in theabove study, we have also integrated hAudio, whose classes were used for publishing information about theaudio/video materials from the Podcasting section of the University’s web site. On account of the fact thathAudio was still a draft, we also had to develop a script that allowed processing of the information publishedusing hAudio classes. Including this script in Operator plug-in, students could download the audio/video filesor they could perform web searches for materials with the same name on web sites like YouTube,TeacherTube, StudentTube, Trilulilu or Google.The functionality and ease of use of the three microformats mentioned above were evaluated with thefourth year students. The results of the tests revealed the fact that microformats were viable tools in an onlinelearning environment (Ermalai, 2010a). As a consequence of these results we plan to develop one or moremodules which would be used for integrating different microformats into the present web portal of“Politehnica” University of Timisoara, which is an implementation of Moodle. Considering the fact thatMoodle is the most used learning management system nowadays, the development of the mentioned moduleswould be a good method for increasing the number of microformats in the educational environment.4. CONCLUSIONSMicroformats are simple, easy-to-use standards which offer a method for publishing structured content on theweb. They are part of the Semantic Web and are much easier to use and understand than Semantic Webvocabularies, known as ontologies (e.g. OWL). The current paper seeks to establish the present use ofmicroformats both in educational as well as non-educational web portals.Research shows that nowadays most of the worldwide known web applications like Facebook, LinkedIn,Chrome, Blogger, Yahoo use microformats for structuring different pieces of information. Special plug-ins389