Structured data makes the Web go around. Search engines love it when webmasters mark up page content. Google’s rich snippets, for instance, leverages sites’ use of microdata (preferred format), or RDFa or microformats: It makes it possible to highlight in a few lines specific types of content in search results, to give users some insight about what’s on the page and its relationship to their queries – prep time for a recipe, for instance.

Plenty of web sites generated from structured data haven’t added HTML markup to their pages, though, so they aren’t getting the benefits that come with search engines understanding the information on those web pages.

Maybe that will change, now that Google has introduced Data Highlighter, an easy way to tell its search engine about the structured data behind their web pages. A video posted by Google product management director Jack Menzel gives the snapshot: “Data Highlighter is a point- and-click tool that allows any webmaster to show Google the patterns of structured data on their pages without modifying the pages themselves,” he says.

Read more

This week, Manning Publications is launching the book “Linked Data,” by David Wood, Marsha Zaidman, Luke Ruth, and Michael Hausenblas.

As part of that launch, Manning is offering a one-day 50% discount for readers of SemanticWeb.com. The discount applies to all versions of “Linked Data”: eBook, print books, and Manning’s “MEAP” books (more on MEAP below). To claim the discount, use coupon code “12linksw” when ordering.

This offer expires at 11:59 pm (US EST) on December 6, so if you’re interested, act fast!

About the Book (description by David Wood):

The flexible, unstructured nature of the Web is being extended to act as a global database of structured data. Linked Data is a standards-driven model for representing structured data on the Web that gives developers, publishers, and information architects a consistent, predictable way to publish, merge and consume data. The Linked Data model offers the potential to standardize Web data in the same way that SQL standardized large-scale commercial databases. Linked Data has been adopted by many well-known institutions, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Oracle and government agencies, as well as popular Open Source projects such as Drupal.

Read more

Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

Read more

FindTheBest, a company that we have previously covered in-depth, reports that the company’s comparison engine has reached ten million unique visits per month and that it’s publisher network now includes 65 premium content partners. The article states, “The comparison engine began syndicating its content to publisher partners in January. Since then, the publisher network has grown to more than 65 content partners including TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Conde´ Nast’s Golf Digest and Bonnier Corporation’s Ski Mag. Through these partnerships, FindTheBest is helping media companies and publishers monetize their sites with the most effective advertising space while keeping a separation between content and commerce.” Read more

Marcela De Vivo reports that Google is experimenting with incorporating Gmail into search results. De Vivo explains, “If you are taking a trip to Tahoe and want to learn more about biking, Google would pull up information about biking in Tahoe into the main organic SERPs. Additionally, they will search your Gmail inbox for emails, including the terms ‘biking in Tahoe,’ and deliver those results on the top, right hand side of the SERPs, giving you access to personalized information regarding your keyword.” Read more

Google has announced the addition of a “Structured Data Dashboard” as a new feature in its Webmaster Tools offerings. The Dashboard gives webmasters greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for a given website. This will no doubt come as good news to people wanting confirmation that Google was consuming the structured data being published.

Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool has been around for a while and allows webmasters to see how their semantic markup might appear in a Rich Snippet. There are tools that allow developers to test semantic markup during the development process. However, until now there has not been a good way for a webmaster to see how (or even if) Google was consuming the structured markup in a given site.

Read more

Dan Brickley announced today that schema.org has added the property “additionalType” to the basic building block, schema.org/Thing. As Brickley says, “The additionalType property makes it possible for Microdata-based publishers to list several relevant types, even when the types are from diverse, independent schemas. This is important for schema.org as it allows our markup to be mixed with other systems, without making it too hard for consuming applications to interpret. A description can use a schema.org type as a base, but mention others (e.g. from DBpedia, Freebase, eventually Wikidata…) to improve the specificity and detail of the description.”

As RDFa already allows for use of multiple vocabularies (through the ‘typeOf’ attribute), it is recommended that RDFa publishers use that native syntax.

Read more

A schema.org blog announcement was posted today by Aaron Brown (Google) and C. Michael Gibson, MD (Wikidoc), announcing “a major set of additions to schema.org that improve our coverage of health and medical topics.” Dan Brickley of schema.org said, “Schema.org gains about 100 classes and 200 properties here, so this is a major addition.”

The announcement points out how this effort is different from existing HCLS vocabulary work as well as previous schema.org work. “Although there are many existing efforts around structured data for health and medicine, such structure is today typically available only ‘behind the scenes’ rather than shared in the Web using standard markup. Our design goals therefore differed from many previous initiatives, in that we focused on markup for use by Webmasters and publishers. Our main goal was to create markup that will help patients, physicians, and generally health-interested consumers find relevant health information via search.”

Read more

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has been underway since Sunday, with tutorials and lightning sessions catching audience interest. The conference presentations get underway today, most of them following on the heels of the opening keynotes given by Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and architect at netage.nl; Jay Myers, web architect at Best Buy; and Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a part of Experian.

Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

Read more

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)