Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the subject of lots of attention over the past few days since the announcement. And the focus of a lot of questions, too.

There’s been discussion on chat boards, for instance, about just who’s gotten access and who hasn’t. In a discussion with a representative from Google, The Semantic Web blog has learned that, like many other new Google services, the roll-out is gradual, in order to ensure the system is handling new functions well. First-come, first-served are those who are signed into Google – but then again, not everyone who is signed in. But the plan is to have everyone who’s signed in on board over the next few days, the rep says; so if you are and don’t have it yet, it should be hitting your browser shortly. Those not signed into Google accounts probably have a week or two of a wait left. So far, the rep said that things have been pretty smooth, so Google’s going at the pace it was hoping to.

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Red Bee Media, a company that “builds bridges between content and viewers” has posted a new article to their corporate blog regarding the growing volumes of television metadata. The article states, “TV Metadata is becoming increasingly rich and complex – powering increasingly advanced experiences. At a basic level, metadata tells us which programmes are available, and informs us about the content of those programmes. But metadata is getting richer and even bigger to support more visually engaging and functionally sophisticated user experiences.” Read more

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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On Friday, February 10, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about data; specifically, the recently announced “wikidata” project with special guest, Denny Vrandecic.
At the recent SemTechBiz Berlin conference, Denny presented a talk titled, “Wikidata: The Next Big Thing for Wikipedia.” As evidenced in the “Wow’s” expressed by the panelists in this month’s podcast call, this is indeed a big deal for Wikipedia and for Semantic Web. Read more

Simply put, RDFa is another syntax for RDF. The interesting aspect of RDFa is that it is embedded in HTML. This means that you can state what things on your HTML page actually mean. For example, you can specify that a certain text is the title of a blog post or it’s the name of a product or it’s the price for a certain product. This is starting to be commonly known as “adding semantic markup”.

Historically, RDFa was specified only for XHTML. Currently, RDFa 1.1 is specified for XHTML and HTML5. Additionally, RDFa 1.1 works for any XML-based language such as SVG. Recently, RDFa Lite was introduced as “a small subset of RDFa consisting of a few attributes that may be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup tasks.” It is important to note that RDFa is not the only way to add semantics to your webpages. Microdata and Microformats are other options, and I will discuss this later on. As a reminder, you can publish your data as Linked Data through RDFa. Inside your markup, you can link to other URIs or others can link to your HTML+RDFa webpages.

Why publish RDFa? Read more

This post was co-authored with Kevin Lynch.

In October, BioBlitz 2011 took place in Tucson’s Saguaro National Park East and West. Thousands of volunteers worked together to discover the biodiversity of this marvelous place I call home. This blog entry outlines the work we’ve done the last few months, the reasons why BioBlitz matters (they might surprise you), and makes a call to photographers to help us test our crowdsourced image classification process.

The Team – National Geographic, National Park Service, Encyclopedia of Life, National Park Foundation

People from around the country worked hard to make BioBlitz successful. There were – and still are – a lot of moving parts. The Park is over 100 square miles, 70% of which is officially “wilderness,” which means, among other things, no wheels allowed! Read more

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

Ivan Herman announced on the W3C blog: “The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. This document defines the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. The term ‘Ontology’ is used in its broadest possible definition: a core vocabulary. The intent of this vocabulary is to bridge the different descriptions of media resources, and provide a core set of descriptive properties.” Read more

Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

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[UPDATE - November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]

Evan Sandhaus, New York Times (seated) and Andreas Gebhard, Getty Images, present rNews.

Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.

Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).

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