@BrianHoadley, the man in the street probably won’t use RDFa directly, but will see it use in many different places. For example we did a demo on Yahoo! showing how job information could be displayed directly in the search results, as opposed to ‘on this page you may find what you are looking for’. Google now indexes RDFa, so it won’t be long before we see useful results giving you information directly being displayed in search results. Then it can be used in a number of ways to provide Linked Data – i.e. lists of items that also refer to the same object on which you can surf.

@Josh – good question. We’re seeking to help educate our suppliers about what we’re looking for from them in terms of coding. Perhaps we should offer a coders’ day sometime?

Are there publicly available apps that will allow them to somehow locate the RDFa tagged data and view it, or do they need to rely on someone else building an interface for them that searches for the RDFa tagged content?

If the latter is the case, then while it is a step forward, for the people interested in the content it is still of little consequence.

For WordPress, which I suspect is somewhat of an edge case when it comes to government CMSes then the approach involved Simon Wheatley’s Custom Post Template plugin to make the post use a special post template, with all the necessary markup ready. In the WordPress admin, all the special metadata is added as a series of custom fields, which are then slotted into the front-end template in the necessary places.

@Noel: you ask a good question – I think it is for central government but not sure about the wider public sector. I’ll ask the COI team.

@Josh: another excellent point, to which I don’t know the answer. Will ask COI too.

I wonder if our friends at Limehouse etc are on board with this?

Presumably in WordPress this has all to be hard coded into templates – or have you found a plugin that helps?