Elias Torres, Ben Adida


Elias Torres, Ben Adida

While the web is primarily for human consumption, more sites are including machine readable data. However, this information is usually included separately.  As the RFDa Primer states, RFDa provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints.  RDFa helps bloggers and website authors make their web pages smarter by adding computer-readable information to a site. Elias Torres and Ben Adida talk about it, including its history and what problems RFDa is attempting to solve.

Torres and Adida also discuss the technical details of RDFa and give a detailed technical description of how RDFa works.  They review the mechanics of RDFa and give examples of its usage.


Elias Torres has spent over 10 years working on the leading edge of Internet technology innovation. He is currently Director of Engineering at Lookery where he is focused on building and perfecting their
cloud-based user targeting platform which is the web 2.0 descendant of behavioral targeting systems. Prior to Lookery, he was a long standing member of IBM's Advanced Internet Technology group which reported directly to the CIO's office.

As the Web has evolved, Elias has directed his research to Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. His work is connected to standards such as SPARQL, RDFa, ODF and Atom as well as open source projects such as Roller, Abdera, and Wordpress. Elias also pioneered Web 2.0 collaboration at IBM by introducing Blogs and Wikis. The success of the collaboration platform led it to become part of Lotus Connections, IBM's first social software suite.

Ben Adida is a member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School and at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, as well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research is focused on security and privacy of health data, the security of web applications, and the design of secure voting systems.

Dr. Adida completed his PhD at MIT in the Cryptography and Information Security group. He is the Creative Commons representative to the W3C, working on interoperable web data as chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force. Previously, he co-founded two software startups that developed database-backed web application platforms based on free/open-source software.

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This free podcast is from our Technometria with Phil Windley series.

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