The W3C GRDDL Working Group has posted the finished recommendation of Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL). According to the abstract,
GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. This GRDDL specification introduces markup based on existing standards for declaring that an XML document includes data compatible with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and for linking to algorithms (typically represented in XSLT), for extracting this data from the document.
The markup includes a namespace-qualified attribute for use in general-purpose XML documents and a profile-qualified link relationship for use in valid XHTML documents. The GRDDL mechanism also allows an XML namespace document (or XHTML profile document) to declare that every document associated with that namespace (or profile) includes gleanable data and for linking to an algorithm for gleaning the data.
The result of such a glean is an RDF description of the document. GRDDL may well be the tipping point that turns the Semantic Web from an academic fantasy to practical tool. Then again it may not. If this doesn't work, the Semantic Web is dead. If it does work, about all I'm sure of is that the Semantic Web is going to look nothing like anyone imagines it today.
The W3C GRDDL Working Group has also posted the finished recommendation of GRDDL Test Cases. "This document describes and includes test cases for software agents that extract RDF from XML source documents by following the set of mechanisms outlined in the Gleaning Resource Description from Dialects of Language [GRDDL] specification. They demonstrate the expected behavior of a GRDDL-aware agent by specifying one (or more) RDF graph serializations which are the GRDDL results associated with a single source document."
