Trent Adams's Library tagged semweb →  View Popular

Yesterday at the second Searchology event, Google announced the adoption of Microformats and RDFa, a structured format of data.  This is another game changer that search marketers need to be aware of.

The Scientific Collaboration Framework (SCF) is reusable software that can be used to develop web-based, collaborative, scientific communities. The framework is designed to support interdisciplinary scientists in publishing, annotating, sharing and discussing content such as articles, perspectives, interviews and news items, as well as assert personal biographies and research interests – the basics of any online community. These web materials can then be linked to external, heterogeneous knowledge repositories of life science resources such as genes, antibodies, cell-lines or model organisms. SCF, thus supports structured “Web 2.0” style community discourse amongst researchers, makes various data resources available to the collaborating scientist and captures the semantics of the relationship among the discourse and resources.

For my enterprise syndication work, I need to grab data from a lot of different data sources and put them (or link to them) in a triple store. That’s fine if the source data is in RDF, but it gets more complicated if it’s not. Probably the biggest not is data that is locked away in a relational database. Since so much information in these things, I can’t ignore them. I’ve got to be able to get at it. But I want to do it in a generic way, without having to change any table structures.

Semantic search is an upcoming technology that has set the expectations way too high. We have all been misled into thinking that these technologies are here to dethrone Google by delivering better search results. Neither of those things are true. What is true, however is that semantic search is going to be big and it is going to help us answer questions that we simply cannot answer today - complex, inferencing queries asked over the entire web as if it was a database.

In order for these semantic search technologies to make a dent in the market, they need

to clean up their messaging and most importantly, their user interface. Presenting a search box is both misleading and detrimental, as people associate it with the simplistic questions that Google solves without any problems. To really showcase semantic search, these companies need to come up

with innovative UIs that will help users to understand the power that is being put at their fingers.

A lot of you emailed me asking where to find more videos, so I'm delivering the goods. I've expanded the previous list from a paltry 17 to a remarkable 302, and I've included podcasts this time! There were so many videos I had to break them up into different categories for easier skimming. There are no duplicates, however I did place some videos into more than one category when I felt it was appropriate. This list is monstrous, enjoy.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

What does all this mean? It means we can expect the web to get itself organized, in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone else that may choose to build applications on top of this data.

Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.

TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I  can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”

That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.

Search Monkey will be the first use of structured data by Yahoo, but they could potentially be used to affect other parts of the search results or ranking algorithms in the future, according to Kumar. Yahoo will provide more details at an upcoming developer conference it's planning in the coming weeks.

All very wonderful, right? Well, maybe not - as some SEOs and webmasters say. Their main concern is that by providing such a structured format of their content - content scrapers will need very little skill in stealing their content and repurposing it in a useful manner. SEOs and webmasters don't mind Yahoo getting this data from them, but they know that leaving this easy to use and structured format open to Yahoo will also give anyone else access to their data. Same issue with XML but this is even more fine tuned data, because webmasters can detail minute details about their content

A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.