Since the early days of Sematic Web I have been expecting that this technology would become very important for Search Engine Optimization.

Until recently, however, the most important component for this to happen has been missing: the major search engines completely ignored RDF and other semantically enriched markup.

This as changed now finally Yahoo and, more recently, Google announced to analyze and index rich mark up like microformats and RDFa.

Just today I stumbled upon a nice article by the E-business and Web Science Research Group of the Universität der Bundeswehr München titled GoodRelations and Yahoo SearchMonkey with five very practical examples how to enhance your web pages for better relevance in the Yahoo search index.
They make use of RDFa and the GoodRelations Web Ontology.

This is all very exciting and I expect way more to come!

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The recent announcement from Google that they will start indexing RDFa and Microformats flew mostly under the radar, but is doesn’t go completely unnoticed (see Zemanta links below).

I personally think that this marks the start of “real world” adoption of semweb, be it through a surrogate approach via microformats.
Why now? Because improved representation of your content in Google is simply too big to ignore. If embedding microformatted content (or, hopefully, RDFa) brings you an advantage in Google Page Rank, web site owners and SEO specialists will rapidly adopt the technology. Without the google index incentive this never would happen.

The other side may be that data quality gets diluted in a way. Up till now we are used to working with reasonably clean and consistent collections (like DBpedia, MusicBrainz to name a few), where the data quality matters all by itself. That is radically different from entering some code for the purpose of cranking up your rank on the search engines.

Maybe in a year from now we are all busy with implementing trust- and reputation systems for linked data instead of spreading the word. I’m curious if the nature of linked data makes this job any easier than with the unstructured web of documents.

Update: Ivan Hermann tells it all in a nutshell: RDFa, Google.

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• Will You Use Google’s New “Rich Snippets” Markups? (seroundtable.com)

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Since about three months ago, when I started using the Zemanta wordpress plugin, the uptake has been huge. Searching for “Related articles by Zemanta” on google gives now 110k+ hits.

To me, this is currently the most practical example where semantic web technology really does make a difference. Just like with Twine, the real benefit of this technology lies in the background, where associations are made and retrieved, “just in time”. All without bothering end-users with ontologies, RDF and SPARQL endpoints. Using Zemanta, all these bloggers are benefiting from the ever increasing web of linked data to enrich their blogs. And the benefit may well be mutual: by carefully selecting the auto-suggested related articles and imagery, you as a blogger tell implicitly what categories your post matches to, thus linking back to the very same pool of linked data.

Give it a try yourself, get the Zemanta plugin (many platforms are supported) and share your experiences!

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Image via Wikipedia - this version is in fact outdated again, by now the open resources have already doubled.

“Linked Media: Weaving non-textual content into the semantic web” – Raphaël Troncy

Traditional media cunsumption (like TV) is declining and moving to the web. The question is: how can we make media into a first class object on the web?

Lots of issues: codecs, metadata, content protection and so on. Is there a viable OSS alternative?

Media Fragments WG

Case: media fragments identification and selective retrieval of media fragments, the goal of the Media Fragments WG of the W3C. Basic principles apply: fragment identification needs to be based on the URI.

There are four dimensions which define a fragment: time (point or interval), space (rectangle for now), track (video, audio, subtitles) and id (the unique name of the fragment).

The possibilities are limited by the container format can express (e.g. quicktime and such) Protocols include http, rtsp and a lot of proprietary protocols like mms, and the various p2p protocols.

Much of the fragment identification is already possible for the most important players in the market, but the syntax is not standard in any way.

Warning, hardcore geekery ahead… Read the rest of this entry »

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Since I have my Android G1 phone, I picked up an old habit of listening to some favorite podcasts (the walkman player in my previous cell phone was simply too crappy for this – sorry Sony, you should have stuck to the cassette tape player).

One of my favorite Semweb podcasts is the Talking with Talis series.

The Clay Shirky conversation is noteworthy, especially if you’re in the content distribution buiness.

Favorite quote: “These (web) tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technically boring” (at 6’15″).

More on this theme in his book “Here comes every body” (haven’t read it yet).

Check it out here: Clay Shirky in Conversation – Here Comes Everybody – the social effects of the Internet. If you want to listen to all podcasts, better subscribe to the Talking witht Talis iTunes feed because the shows are scattered all over the various talis sites- and blogs.

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Do you want to make your blog Semantic Web ready, but don’t know where to start?

Just download and install the Triplify script, a lightweight tool to translate SQL query results into RDF triples and return the result in N3 (Notation3) or as JSON.

The script itself is only capable of generating RDF, the actual matching between data and RDF output is specified in a configuration file. These configurations are available for many popular web applications, here is a Triplify configuration for WordPress 2.7.x.

Installing is almost as simple as dropping the triplify directory in your WordPress root directory and uploading the correct configuration file. No need to configure any specific values for your WordPress set-up, these are read from the top level wp-config.php file.

Now go to your blog and request the URL http://yourblog/triplify/ – this will return your blog’s content as RDF/N3 and at the same time register the feed at the Triplify Registration (well, if you leave the register switch at “true” in the config file).

Now you dan play with your RDF data in various sources on the web, or locally.

A good start for exploration is the SIMILE Welkin browser, also available as Java web start: run Welkin thru Java WebStart.

Continue for an example…

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