Tag My City(TMC) team has been updating the website�s XHTML/CSS to be Microformats compliant.
By adopting Microforamts, TMC�s public information will be more accessible on the web.
In addition, events calendar and contacts information can be integrated and reused easily between different applications. For example; you could automatically synchronize your cellphone or desktop calendar with TMC events calendar. And you can add restaurants� contact information to your address book with a click of a button.

Background information

Web content is usually created for human consumption without paying attention to machine readability making it difficult to provide elegant solutions to information retrieval and data integration.

This problem is what�s known as transforming data into information. Most solutions propose adding metadata(description) to data to give it meaning, thus to make it understandable by machines.

Semantic Web encourages using standardized vocabularies to describe data. As the name implies, standardized vocabularies are standard keywords or tags that describe data.

Microformats provide powerful yet simple sets of data formats that can be simply added to web content to make it both readable by humans and machines.
These sets are growing very fast to cover most forms of data e.g. contacts, reviews, events, resumes, listings, tags, etc.

Using Microformats is very easy. For example if you want to present a user name in your web content then you use the standard tags to describe both first name and last name. Let�s say �fn??? means full name. Now you can add �fn??? to your XHTML


<span class=???vcard???> <span class=???fn???>Kinan Sweidan</span></span>


When a machine reads �vcard??? it understands that the tag contains contact information. Similarly when it reads �fn?, it understands that �fn? means full name.

This approach is very powerful because it allows accurate information retrieval. Let�s say I want to look up reviews for �McDonalds??? by �Bill Clinton?, the machine (in this case the search engine) will try to deliver accurate information by searching metadata (for example �fn? and �hreview?) combined with my keywords (�Bill Clinton? and �McDonalds???)

Microformats make data integration much easier allowing different applications to exchange and reuse data.