Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

 

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The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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Are you wondering why your product pages don’t stand out in search results like those from Amazon (shown below) or other competing e-commerce websites? These expanded results are commonly known as Rich Snippets (as named by Google) and are the result of having your HTML structured correctly with semantic markup. Whether you’re savvy to HTML5 and the latest design trends, or you haven’t updated your website code in years, this is article will explain why it’s important you structure your data properly utilizing semantic standards.

There are a number of ways to structure your data to make it more relevant to search engines, as well as social media sites. As an e-commerce retailer it is important to understand which of these standards you should consider including in your website. You should take some time to ensure you are implementing semantic markup, and doing it correctly. It has the power to better inform potential customers with upfront knowledge prior to landing on your site. Customers can see product reviews, pricing and stock information, and even images before clicking through to your website. This can lead to increased click-through rates, improve conversions, and generally enhance your SEO objectives.

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Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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Searching on the web gets better with semantic technology. How about searching in your local supermarket?

Point Inside launched a private ad network offering this week that blends indoor shopper- and product-location technologies with proprietary semantic matching features to understand how what’s on users’ digital grocery lists can connect to what’s on a store’s shelves – and to opportunities to deliver in-context deals to consumers who opt in at the appropriate point in time.

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Just a little over a year ago The Semantic Web Blog introduced our readers to Gravity in this article. The project, spearheaded by former MySpace execs, is focused on building the Interest Graph. The team’s been pretty quiet about development efforts since that time — until just this month, when it announced Gravity Labs to let the public in on a little more about its underlying Interest Graph infrastructure and to showcase the platform. It also announced that it was open-sourcing some of the “plumbing” code it came up with during development, while understandably keeping its core IT, ontology and algorithms under wraps.

The announcement noted that the internally-named Gravity Interest Service for personalizing content at scale, in real-time, went live at production-scale 6 months ago. So far the technology has created over 400 million user interest graphs; served over 13 million pieces of personalized content per day; personalized the daily Internet experience of tens of millions of users per month; and processed over 25 million inbound interest signals per day, the company says. It expects that at this rate, that in under six months it will be handling 10X all of these numbers.

The Semantic Web Blog once again caught up with Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto to talk some more about the Interest Graph, a term he acknowledges gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with a lot of web sites claiming they’ve got the goods. But, he says, “what they effectively are saying is that buried deep within the data of our logs or deep in the data of how our users interact with our site, we know there are interest indicators there. But a lot of them are not doing much with their data.” Interest Graphs, he says, aren’t owned, but interest data resides in individual places and across the web at large — and they need the Gravity platform to help unlock that to create dynamic and personalized experiences for users, Benedetto says.

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The coolest thing at the 109^th International American Toy Fair in New York City this week might have been the Lazer Tag Blaster or the World of Warcraft version of Monopoly. Or, for semantic tech aficionados, it would have been Uma’s semantic Skin multitouch display installation. Even the Power Rangers were getting into it (see photo).

Here is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite, and social media integration. It is, as Christian Doegl, founder and CEO of uma, an example “where semantics gets tangible.”  And touchable by everyone.

For the Toy Fair, Uma got access to the exhibitor database, itself complete with structured metadata such as company name, location on the floor, and Twitter handle. “From this we can build up a semantic database connecting all different databases to the system,” says Doegl.

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Users of Prestashop, the popular open source e-commerce package that powers over 100,ooo shops, now have easy access to semantic markup through the release of a free extension module from Makolab S.A. The extension adds markup from the GoodRelations vocabulary using RDFa syntax to the product item page templates. Read more

 

More vendors are making waves among the ranks of those that figure semantic technology has a role to play in the travel sector, from helping hospitality providers assess the quality of user experiences to serving as a B2B backbone for companies that want to help users book travel plans, whether they’re aiming to spend Thanksgiving with the family in Nebraska or Christmas shopping in Paris, and more.

* At the PhoCusWrite 2011 Travel Innovation Summit last week, ReviewPro won the QuickMobile Award for Travel Innovation: Emerging Category.

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Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy, has moved the proverbial ball forward yet again by creating an implementation of the schema.org vocabulary in BestBuy’s Black Friday web pages.

First, a bit of history…

Myers began incorporating structured data into BestBuy web pages in 2009. Starting initially with basic store information (hours of operation, location, contact information), Myers soon expanded the project to include product pages, music data, and the 600,000+ item product catalog. This work quickly became a widely cited use-case for semantic markup. In particular, it brought a lot of attention to the RDFa syntax and the GoodRelations vocabulary. The effort resulted in improved page rankings, richer display of BestBuy search listings in browsers, and — after putting user-friendly tools in the hands of store managers —  enabled Myers to tackle the retail problem of Open Box returns.

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