Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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

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.

Read more

Last month, we reported on the new RDFa 1.1 Lite proposal by Ben Adida. In our recent podcast on Schema.org with guest Ramanathan V. Guha, we touched on the topic of RDFa Lite as well.

Today, schema.org spokesperson Dan Brickley posted that “we’re pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org’s structured data vocabulary. W3C’s RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly ‘Lite’ view of RDFa.”

Read more

[Editor's Note: In our most recent SemanticLink podcast with special guest R.V. Guha, we mentioned RDFa 1.1 Lite, proposed by Ben Adida at last month's Schema.org workshop. Thanks to Manu Sporny for sharing the following look at RDFa 1.1 Lite.]

Summary: RDFa 1.1 Lite is a simple subset of RDFa consisting of the following attributes: vocab, typeof, property, rel, about and prefix.

During the schema.org workshop, a proposal was put forth by RDFa’s resident hero, Ben Adida, for a stripped down version of RDFa 1.1, called RDFa 1.1 Lite. The RDFa syntax is often criticized as having too much functionality, leaving first-time authors confused about the more advanced features. This lighter version of RDFa will help authors easily jump into the Linked Data world. The goal was to create a very minimal subset that will work for 80% of the folks out there doing simple markup for things like search engines. Read more

On Friday, October 14, 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 schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

• Play the Podcast (1 hour)
• Subscribe to the Monthly Podcast
• See All Semantic Link Podcasts

Read more

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

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).

Read more

A recent article informs online retailers that “Starting now, you’re going to need good structured markup on your X/HTML in addition to your white hat tactics. I see structured markup as being equally important to authoritative inbound links as a ranking factor when optimizing content. Why? Because search robots are designed to serve search engine users by matching their search query expectations, known as user intent. These bots are machines, and they’re trying to discern the human mind’s evaluation of information in answer to human-entered keywords.” Read more

PoolParty, a sponsor of the upcoming SemTechBiz UK conference, has released a free linked data plugin for WordPress. According to PoolParty, “In a recent video Matt Cutts from Google announced that smart internal linking is one of the key strategies for SEO in 2011. So PoolParty Team has released a freely available plugin for WordPress (download plugin) which consumes linked data and offers features for any WordPress driven blog or website making it more understandable and helping to improve interlinking articles. The website will be improved by linking posts with key terms and key terms with other key terms.” Read more