Assignment 2: Semantic Markup

This assignment consists of 2 parts. In the first part, you are to enrich a Web page with semantic markup. In the second part, you will analyse the markup of a Web page created by another team.

Part 1: In this part, you will create/enrich Web pages with semantic markup

• Step 1: In each group, mark up two different Web pages with the appropriate markup describing properties of at least people, relationships to other people, locations, some temporally related data and some multimedia. You can either enrich your own or someone else’s homepage or set up a site specifically for this course. You can also try out tools such as Google Markup Helper
• Step 2: Validate your semantic markup. Use for example http://inspector.sindice.com/, http://microform.at or Google Structured Data Testing Tool or another validator that can validate the markup you have chosen.
• Step 3: In your research report, explain why you chose particular markups. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of the different markups you have chosen for the different purposes they might serve. Include screenshots from different validators for the corresponding markup.

Part 2: In this part of the assignment, you will evaluate the markup of the Web pages of another group. Each of you will perform two evaluations: one in the role of the consumer and one in the role of publisher. You may choose which of the Web pages you evaluate in which role. Per group you will thus include six evaluations in your report. Make sure to team up with another group in time to coordinate the evaluation.

[Note: Not all validators are perfect, when you share your website with the team that is going to evaluate it, please state which validator you have used.]

• Step 1: From the perspective of your role, evaluate the semantic markup of the page and report your findings. Aspects of your evaluation should be whether the markup facilitates findability or extraction of content. The exact criteria of your evaluation depend on the type of markup you are evaluating, if the markup was intended to make create rich author snippets in Google, you can find relevant aspects for your evaluation in Google’s explanation or here. If the markup was intended to markup locations you can for example look at a schema location markup howto.
• Step 2: Support your critique with examples of how the semantic markup of the page could be improved.

Do realise that you cannot start your research report with the description of your websites, but include an introductory section in which you explain what semantic markup is, what it is for, what it looks like etc. Also explain what the reader can expect to read in the report. End the report with a concluding section. Support your choices and explanations with appropriate literature references. The report should not exceed 5 pages (excluding screen shots). The details of the evaluations of the other groups markup can be added to the report as an appendix.

Deadline: 4 March 23:59.