Learn how to add RDFa metadata to DITA and DocBook documents, how to keep those documents valid, and what advantages this technique can bring to a DITA- or DocBook-based publishing system.
by Bob DuCharme
August 20, 2009
he RDF data model gives you a way to add attribute name/value pairs to any resource that you can reference with a URI. This makes it easy to create metadata about nearly anything. The W3C's RDFa standard is an increasingly popular syntax for storing RDF statements inside HTML documents, but according to the RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing W3C Recommendation, "RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language" (my emphasis).
The recommendation goes on to state: "this specification deals specifically with the use of RDFa in XHTML, and defines an RDF mapping for a number of XHTML attributes, but RDFa can be easily imported into other XML-based markup languages." This flexibility can come in very handy when you work with publishing systems based on the DITA or DocBook XML specification. The flexibility of DocBook and DITA Document Type Definitions (DTDs) make it easy to add RDFa to any documents that conform to these standards, and perhaps even to reduce your need to further customize these DTDs for your own company's publishing system.
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he RDF data model gives you a way to add attribute name/value pairs to any resource that you can reference with a URI. This makes it easy to create metadata about nearly anything. The W3C's RDFa standard is an increasingly popular syntax for storing RDF statements inside HTML documents, but according to the 
