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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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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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!

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.

In short, that specification meant to say that a <h1> element should convey the meaning of a top/document title, followed hierarchically by <h2> for chapter titles, <h3> for subtitles and <h4> for section titles and so on. Thus a <p> marked a paragraph, and more interesting, things like <cite> would mark a literal citation. This is called semantic markup.

So far so good, the resulting presentation in the browsers of those days was very bland and we needed a more sexy look for marketing purposes. Thus the markup was pushed towards the presentational limits – presentational markup indeed, where elements were used for their look, rather than their semantic meaning. A <blockquote> element no longer meant some sort of citation, but rather an indented paragraph of text. HTML itsel suffered from presentational elements as well: the <b>old tag and the <i>talics define presentation. For meaning, we have <strong> (rendered as bold type) and <em>phasis (rendered in italics). Quite a mess.

OK, so right now, the POSH movement has come to life. Where POSH stands for Plain Old Semantic Html. It all originated from within the Microformats movement, but discussions on the mailing list indicate that most microformat advocates think of POSH as being not related to microformats in general.

And I agree. Sure, good to see semantic correct use of html on the web, but this approach is way too simple in general to extract real meaning. If the web only existed of sceintific papers and novels, then maybe we could rely on the stricture of html as originally specified. And write a GRDDL transformation, which then says as much as: this <blockquote> is a citation of something else. Of what exactly, would still be left up for guessing.

All in all, using POSH wherever you can is good practice. But this has almost nothing to do with real semantic web. And could someone please help me to explain what the semantic meaning of <strong> versus <em>phasis is?

To finish with a famous qoute:

[Solutions should be] as simple as possible, but no simpler.

– Albert Einstein.

[ratings]

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

In de gedrukte versie was geen ruimte meer voor een aantal toelichtingen, die heb ik daarom hier toegevoegd:

Artikel Microformats.

Toelichtingen:

• Basis van het Semantic Web
• hCard in html
• GRDDL als brug
• Veiligheid en privacy

[ratings]

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

[ratings]