XHTML with RDFa as a Semantic Document Format for CCTS Modelled Documents and Its Application for Social Services

For achieving semantic interoperability, messages or documents exchanged electronically between systems are commonly modelled using standard specifications, such as the UN/CEFACT CCTS (core components technical specification). However, additional requirements, such as the need for layout markup or common metadata for certain archiving scenarios might be applied to the documents. Furthermore, the management of resulting artefacts, i.e., core components, XML schemas and related infrastructure, could be cumbersome in some cases. This paper investigates the use of the W3C XHTML+RDFa (extensible hypertext markup language with resource description framework attributes) for representing both the layout and semantics of documents modelled according to CCTS. The paper focuses on the validation of XHTML+RDFa documents against a core components library represented as an ontology. In addition, the paper illustrates and validates this demand-driven solution in the scope of the Finnish National Project for IT in Social Services.