DCMF: DC & Microformats, a good marriage

Abstract

This report introduces the Dublin Core Microformats (DCMF) project, a new way to use the DC element set within X/HTML. The DC microformats encode explicit semantic expressions in an X/HTML webpage, by using a specific list of terms for values of the attributes “rev” and “rel” for <a> and <link> elements, and “class” and “id” of other elements. Microformats can be easily processed by user agents and software, enabling a high level of interoperability. These characteristics are crucial for the growing number of social applications allowing users to participate in the Web 2.0 environment as information creators and consumers. This report reviews the origins of microformats; illustrates the coding of DC microformats using the Dublin Core Metadata Gen tool, and a Firefox extension for extraction and visualization; and discusses the benefits of creating Web services utilizing DC microformats.