The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group published four Working Drafts today. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata.

• Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata
• Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set.
• Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools
• Primer (First Public Draft)

Last Call comments are welcome through 5 December.

Yahoo! has just published a SW Case Study. The Case Study describes the SearchMonkey application that reuses structural data embedded in Web pages (in, eg, RDFa, eRDF, or microformats) to produce more compelling search results.

The “RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing” document has been translated into French by Jean-Jacques Solari under the title “RDFa dans XHTML — Syntaxe et traitement”.

The W3C OWL Working group recently held another highly successful Face to Face meeting co-located with the Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week in Mandelieu, France. During two days of intensive technical discussions the Working Group succeeded in resolving almost all outstanding issues. The meeting culminated in a resolution to publish as LAST CALL Working Drafts the seven documents that make up the technical specification of OWL 2 (see http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2008/10/10/seven_owl_2_drafts_published), the target publication date being December 1st 2008.

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML2 Working Group published the W3C Recommendation RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. This specification allows publishers to express structured data on the Web within XHTML, enabling a new world of user functionality, allowing users to transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience. For those looking for an introduction to the use of RDFa and some real-world examples, please consult the updated RDFa Primer.

The W3C OWL Working Group published seven documents related to the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. OWL 2 extends OWL adding new features that users have requested and that software providers are prepared to implement. The documents are:

1. Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
2. Direct Semantics
3. RDF-Based Semantics (First Public Draft)
4. Mapping to RDF Graphs
5. XML Serialization
6. Profiles
7. Conformance and Test Cases (First Public Draft)

The first three documents form the technical core of OWL 2, which has both a traditional "direct" semantics (for OWL DL) and a new "RDF-based" semantics (for OWL Full). Documents 4 and 5 specify two different serializations for OWL ontologies, one based on RDF and one using XML more directly. Document 6 defines useful subsets of OWL which may be easier to implement or may better meet certain performance requirements. Finally, document 7 specifies conformance and will later enumerate the OWL 2 test cases. Five other documents are under development; but they are not yet ready for public review.

The “SPARQL Update” document has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts of Hewlett-Packard, Freie Universität, DERI Galway, Oracle, Talis, Garlik, OpenLink, INRIA, Computas, and Semsol. The document describes an update language for RDF graphs. It uses a syntax derived form SPARQL. Update operations are performed on a collection of graphs in a Graph Store. Operations are provided to change existing RDF graphs as well as create and remove graphs with the Graph Store.

The W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group today published Representing Content in RDF as a First Public Working Draft. This document provides a vocabulary to represent content in RDF, and is flexible for any type of content available on the Web or in local storage media. The Working Group also published an an updated Working Draft of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF, which defines terms to allow HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server to be recorded in RDF. These documents can be used to extend the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, an RDF vocabulary to record test results such as those generated by Web accessibility evaluation tools. They are part of the EARL Specification.