President Obama uses RDFa

The WhiteHouse.gov site is CC licensing all its material, and if you peek behind the covers (view source), you will see some RDFa. Granted it is a small start, but it is a start. Well done to the new administration and I look forward to more openness and more Web mashups!


Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a>.
Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the
world for their  submissions to <a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov">Whitehouse.gov</a>
under the <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/">Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a>

All the extra property, rel and xmlns attributes are used by RDFa to add additional semantic structure to the document. Above it is used to better describe the licensing for the document. This information can be used by APIs to auto-discover content licensing and determine, without human intervention, that the content is safe to use.

Learn more at the RDFa wiki.

Written By:

David Peterson

David Peterson has been a web developer since the early years - 1995. He works in the steamy tropics and cranks out high performance Drupal sites that integrate with the OpenData Web. His wonderful family, making lovely photographs and searching for the perfect espresso keeps him happy.

Website
>> More Posts By David Peterson

{ 7 comments }

cydewaze February 5, 2009 at 1:25 am: Shame they didn’t use re-directs for their old pages. Our website here at work has dozens of links to official docs that live on Whitehouse.gov. Once the new admin took over, we had dozens of broken links.
When you move official stuff, you should at least leave a re-direct.
spVince February 2, 2009 at 7:03 pm: Shame they decided to use underscores for URL’s :-(
Publicus Domaineus January 30, 2009 at 10:49 am: Note that everything is actually Public Domain. The license notes that all third party content will be CC licensed unless otherwise specified. Anything produced by the Federal Government belongs to the taxpayers, and so goes public domain.
cssProdigy January 29, 2009 at 1:13 pm: I’m so glad our President has embraced the new technologies of the web.
david.seth.p January 29, 2009 at 12:16 pm: @jef2904 – thanks. @Usage police – thanks. Fixed. You both caught me on a bad day!
Usage police January 29, 2009 at 12:14 pm: If we’re pointing out typos, you misspelled ‘peek’
jef2904 January 29, 2009 at 11:46 am: Theres a typo in the last line. “Lear more at the RDFa wiki.”