I also expect that we’ll see more short URLs used for microdata, as already mentioned in the article. In fact, I’m surprised schema.org went with something as verbose as they did, instead of, say, http://ty.pe/Person...

1) de-reference to something useful, eg. annotations that express basic mappings between terms, or say which properties are functional, inverse functional etc. Or multilingual labels.

2) be really nice short URIs without loads of unnecessary clutter.

For (1) I’d prefer microdata’s rdf mapping to use decentralised URIs directly, not point them all off at W3C. Or maybe it could be an argument to parsers? For (2) I suspect the RDF community might need to save up its pocket money and buy some nice short domain names. I’m considering using http://foaf.tv/Person as an alias for http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person for example…

Interesting re the Neo4J connection – did you ever try Gremlin / Tinkerpop tools?

I wrote up some recent experiments – http://danbri.org/words/2011/05/10/675 – it’s quite a nice way to interact with this kind of data. If we can get graph structures from microdata, that should just plug right in too…

RDF is one form of microdata to label and annotate the data. Without knowing specifically what your system are, I’d advise you to research different kinds of machine-readable data and decide which is most appropriate for you. An example that recently …

e.g

<p class="vcard" item="vcard" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" about="#me">
  I'm <span class="fn" itemprop="fn" property="foaf:name">Philip Jägenstedt</span> at
  <a class="url" itemprop="url" rel="foaf:homepage" href="http://foolip.org/">foolip.org</a>.
</p>