The W3C RDFa Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the RDFa API. RDFa API provides a mechanism that allows Web-based applications using documents containing RDFa markup to extract and utilize structured data in a way that is useful to developers. The specification details how a developer may extract, store and query structured data contained within one or more RDFa-enabled documents. The design of the system is modular and allows multiple pluggable extraction and storage mechanisms supporting not only RDFa, but also Microformats, Microdata, and other structured data formats.
About Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.