Microformats: Context Inline

As it stands today, web pages are for eyeballs only. Though the web contains many different types of information about people, places, events, and more, only a human is able to make sense of it all.

Information encoded in HTML is, unfortunately, indecipherable to machines and therefore not easily indexed, searched, or reused. To overcome this problem, microformats have been developed as a way to encode structured data within web content using existing standards.

Microformats epitomize the Web 2.0 concept of small pieces loosely joined. They can be embedded in any HTML-aware format, including Atom and RSS feeds or web pages, and can also build on one another to be remixed and recombined. Ultimately, microformats can help turn unstructured library information into structured machine-understandable data. When possible, libraries should consider taking advantage of microprints to expose information to a wider audience and make it reusable in new and unanticipated ways.

One significant advantage of microformats over other Semantic Web technologies is their simplicity and ease of adoption. This is partly because they use regular HTML syntax that's widely understood. Once deployed, they allow for the harvesting and aggregation of encoded content from different sites. So instead of posting a book review on Amazon or LibraryThing, you might post a review on your blog using the hReview microformat, which flags it for harvesting by other systems.

Currently, there are nine stable microformats and several others in draft form, many of which may be of interest to libraries. The hCard microformat is used to encode contact information within a webpage, while the hCalendar microformat is used for calendars and events. HTML marked by rel=“license” is used to indicate licenses like those from Creative Commons and is the element behind many searches that crawl Creative Commons licensed content. This tag therefore enables targeted search that can be used to filter search results, as with the Yahoo! search described below.

To encode author-designated tags for a given piece of web content, rel=“tag” is used. As noted above, review information about books or any other kind of content or product can be marked with hReview. The geo and adr microformats indicate location information, with adr used for addresses and geo for latitude and longitude.

Not all applications are capable of reading microformats, but one good way to see them in action is to install the Operator extension for Firefox. This extension adds a toolbar to your web browser that will show you all the microformats within a web page and allow you to use them. Plugins are also available for Safari and Internet Explorer.

On the content side, several systems like Drupal and Wordpress allow users to embed microformats. The Event module for Drupal uses the hCalendar microformat encoding, and the wpLicense plugin for Wordpress allows users to add a Creative Commons license on their blog and have it encoded via the rel=“license” microformat. This can be used by several search engines including Yahoo! to limit search results to a particular license or licenses.

So how might microformats be useful to libraries and librarians? hCard and hCalendar microformats can be used to make library event and contact information easily downloadable by users. Rel=“license” information could be embedded in digital collections to convey rights information easily to both users and search engines. hReview could be used to mark up reviews of library resources (books, articles, etc.). Location-oriented microformats could encode the library's address and geospatial location, or be used to describe location metadata about collections.

Libraries should also be aware that research is underway on a citation microformat. This will contain similar information to COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) but instead of building on OpenURL context object, it will break the data down into component parts to make it more flexible.

The technical barriers to using microformats are low, and the benefits of implementing them are high. Therefore, libraries should investigate implementing microformats as part of their library web sites and other web-based systems to expose content to a wider audience, make it reusable, and enhance user experiences.