SemanticCamp London

February 18, 2008

I went to one day* of SemanticCamp this weekend at Imperial College in London. It was really enjoyable and it was great to see so many people show up and take part. Kudos to Tom Morris and Daniel John Lewis for their organisational skills.

Ben Ward and I represented microformats.org and did a presentation-ish chat and Q&A session entitled "Microformats: State of the Nation" and covered recent happenings in the microformat world and some things we might hope to see this year.

So, when I say "presentation-ish" what we did was chat about a list of things that we'd thought about during the morning, presented via a quick list from my email inbox, via my new Asus EEE (which is still super cute, and is the black 4GB surf before you ask). Yeah, we're professional. To sum up what we covered though, here's an elaborated version of said list:

Current:
- Big Deployments
- Kelkoo listings (hListing, soon), hCards
- Google Social Graph (XFN and FOAF indexing)
Parsers increasing:
- PHP (hKit)
- XSL: Optimus, x2v
- .NET (ufXtract)
- Python (AUMP (currently offline))
- Java? Oh. Soz.
New Formats:
- Audio (Last.FM, Songbird, Music browsers)
- Listings
- Recipe?
Accessibility:
- Building better relationships with accessibility community
- Clarified the uses of the include-pattern, via Mike Davies of Yahoo
- More to come… - Hopefully full abbr-pattern testing
Future:
- Distributed Social Networking
- Google Social Graph API
- Distributed identity with OpenID
- Distributed contact lists
- Build on URLs
- Consolidate identity URLs using XFN
- hCard providing context and detail
- XFN describing social relationships

We had lots of questions and it was actually great. One thing that came up a couple of times in a few conversations I had was a desperate need for a full test suite for microformats. Unfortunately, such things are hard to get done because the work is time consuming and not especially interesting or rewarding. I wonder if anyone has experience on the best way to get a full test set written for all current formats?

Our session overran, but thanks for coming by if you did and as always, feel free to come by and join the mailing list(s) and get involved.

* Day two I did not make it to due to late night Brighton fun for Andy Budd's flat-warming. Thanks very much for putting us up for the night, Jeremy! Apologies to SemanticCampers who wanted to play with the EEE some more.