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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In response to Microformats vs. RDF: How Microformats Relate to the Semantic Web.

Indeed, microformats are not an alternative for RDF, not even a “poor man’s version”. But that was not a design goal at any time. What’s more: microformats are no first class semantic web objects in any way either. Rather, they are the simplest imaginable solution for semantically correct markup, limited to the most common data formats out there.

To rephrase the microformats charter, they want to be the common man’s solution, aimed at the well intending webmaster crowd. As such, microformats can be hugely successful (analogue to the “html as tag soup” success story). Fine.

Next, as we end up having millions of valid items of hCard, hReview and what not on the web, there is GRDDL to instantly promote all this content in full fledged RDF.

The good news is that we have all components currently available – many microformats are auto-generated from well designed CMS templates – and GRDDL is a Proposed Recommendation since 6 July 2007.

What we’re waiting for, is a business need to discover, transform and aggregate all of this data. I would be surprised if nobody is working on this, right now. Google, or a Google killer?

Bottom line: the semantic web has been lacking real world content for too long (not withstanding DBPedia and Freebase and such) and real world applications for the common man. Microformats can and will have a place in advocacy for this large target audience, people who grasp html and basic data constructs, but who are not interested in graph theory.

This audience will only jump on the bandwagon if they can instantly understand the intent from view source inspection. Compare the success of RSS 2.0 over the semantically superior (but more complex, RDF based) RSS 1.0 version.

In the end it will just not matter, most content will be “good enough” to be useful for the semweb (through GRDDL transformations and screen scraping), just like today’s html is good enough to be rendered, in some way, in our web browsers. By that time we will have a load of other problems, like semantic spam, the need for provenance tracking and trust levels for semantic information. But that is another story…

Update:  Semantic Report writes about Using Microformats to Get Started with the Semantic Web. So, there then!

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This year will be the year of the semantic web for the common man, in the first place because of the success of microformats. And because of the original semantic web people, who in general have a very positive attitude towards the grassroots adoption, helping a hand with tools and specifications like GRDDL.

This whole movement has led to another change as well. That is, as I see it, people getting to finally understand what the meaning of the original HTML specification was all about: it is the semantics, not the presentation in the first place.

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I wrote an article about the emerging practice of embedding semantic data in html documents, AKA Microformats.

This article has been published in Usability Magazine #3, see usabilityweb.nl. It is available in Dutch only…

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If you are interested in current developments around the Semantid Web, you must absolutely check out these slides: The state of the Semantic Web, by Ivan Herman for the International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries, Bangalore feb. 23th 2007.

An interesting section answers common questions about what is RDF and what not. But every page is wirth its full attention!

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