Microformats for News Articles: the hNews Standard

Posted on November 23, 2009
Filed Under data portability, linked data, online search, semantic web, social media, social networking, web access, web evolution | View Comments

microformat

A new microformat for online news has been developed by the Media standards Trust and the Web Science Reaseach Initiative: it’s called hNews.

The goal is to make relevant elements of news articles machine-readable, and at the same time, to disply these metadata in a user-friendly format.

Automatically generated informations about the article – for instance title, author, date, last update, useful links – could appear, thanks to hNews, in a pop-up text box: look at this article for an example.

According to the hNews team, it’s a form of “source tagging” that will help granting transparency, high-quality content, and specific reasearch.

Just think of filtering “eyewitness accounts” in searching for the keywords “Pakistan riots” – for instance.

Or tracking changes, embedding updates within articles, in a Wikipedia-sort-of way…

Possibly an important development for a Semantic Web, imho.

Source: Craig Silverman / Columbia Journalism Review