Ben Adida is back again from the first tech conference with a new talk about RDFa.

First he gave a brief review of RDFa: there exists a huge chasm between the human web and the data web. RDFa addresses our need to bridge this gap. We want machine-readable metadata so we can use computer programs to answer simple questions about a work to save on time and effort. He then moved on to explaining ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language. There are four principles for publishing in HTML: 1) visual correspondence, 2) don't repeat yourself, 3) remix friendliness, 4) extensibility and modularity.

For the main portion of his talk, Ben went over the events of the past six months regarding RDFa adoption.

• April-May: Digg deployed RDFa.
• June: RDFa goes W3C "Candidate Recommendation" with around 12 implementations (parsers).
• June: Open Archives Initiatives supports RDFa; UK National Archive uses RDFa.
• September: Yahoo SearchMonkey deploys RDFa support.
• October: RDFa goes W3C Recommendation.
• November: CC launches the CC network in November; Drupal announces roadmap for RDFa integration.

He concluded with a demonstration of sample SearchMonkey functionality that grabs CC license metadata from search results and displays that information on the search page.

What's next?, asks Ben, with a strong disclaimer that this is just a small glimpse of what is possible. He points to HTML 4 and 5 integration, the simplification of common cases (not having to keep redefining common namespaces), finding common ground with the microformat community, and better search and in-browser tools.

The question Ben asks you to take away is this: What are you waiting for to consume and/or publish RDFa?