Market Scan

The U.S. Department of Defense is looking at microformats and mashups to aggregate existing data and bring intelligence to soldiers.

The U.S. Department of Defense is looking to mashups and something called microformats to help bring the Web to the modern day soldier and battlefield operative.

Microformats are lightweight, non-invasive metadata used to mark up Web pages easily, and mashups are Web services to aggregate information contained in unrelated Web pages in a wide variety of ways—many of them unanticipated by the original content designer.

The Pentagon is meddling with both technologies to use microformats with mashups to help expose legacy information for broader reuse, said Rosie Morales, an expert from Pentagon contractor Mitre, on Dec. 4 at the XML 2007 show, here.
[read more]