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Google Debuts Data Highlighter: An Easy Way Into Structured Data

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:55:40 +0000

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.

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New “Linked Data” Book Launches – 50% Discount for Our Readers

Eric Franzon — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:59:05 +0000

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.

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GoodRelations Fully Integrated with Schema.org

Eric Franzon — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:54 +0000

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.”

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FindTheBest Reaches 10M Visitors a Month

Angela Guess — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:00:37 +0000

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.” continued…

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Google Incorporating Gmail into Search

Angela Guess — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:00:00 +0000

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.” continued…

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Google Introduces Structured Data Dashboard

Eric Franzon — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:58:31 +0000

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.

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Schema.org adds “Additional Type” Property

Eric Franzon — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:44:43 +0000

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.

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Schema.org Adds Health and Medical Vocabulary

Eric Franzon — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:00:18 +0000

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.”

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SemTech Keynotes Show The Power of the Semantic Web

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:00:02 +0000

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.

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Expert Schema.org Panel Finalized for #SemTechBiz San Francisco Program

Eric Franzon — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:42:58 +0000

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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Schema.org Now Supports External Lists

Eric Franzon — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:22:12 +0000

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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New Resource for Web Developers – Add Linked Data to HTML with RDFa.info

Eric Franzon — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:30:57 +0000

For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Manu Sporny

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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Catching Up With Yandex: What Russia’s Leading Search Engine Has To Say About Schema.org

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:44:14 +0000

Update: Yandex today (April 26th) reported that net income in the first three months of 2012 rose 53 percent from the same period last year to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million) as text-based advertising revenue rose, according to Bloomberg. Sales gained 51 percent to 5.9 billion rubles.

In November Russian search engine Yandex joined Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. The Semantic Web Blog recently caught up by email with Alexander Shubin, Yandex product manager and head of strategic direction, to discuss this and other developments.

The Semantic Web Blog: Can you update us about how Yandex is doing? We know it’s still leading search traffic in Russia, but do you see more competition there, and how have international expansion plans been proceeding?

Shubin: Yandex is the leader in Russia with 59 to 60 percent market share. Russia is one of the few countries where a local search engine keeps a leading position, in spite of international players’ expansion.

Last year Yandex was launched in Turkey, where we suggest 12 services (including web search) so far. According to our statistics, yandex.com.tr processes more than 1 million queries daily. Turkey is the first non-Russian speaking market for us and we have done a lot of work to deliver services that would be interesting for the local community. The main target for Yandex in Turkey, where one search engine still keeps 90 percent of search market, is to become the Number 2 player and to deliver more local search results and services than our competitor does.

Turkey is more or less an experiment for us: If we meet our target there, we can potentially do the same on any other non-Russian speaking market. But it is too early to make any conclusions or announcements so far as we have worked in Turkey only half of year. Stay tuned!

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Google Announces Updates to Rich Snippets

Eric Franzon — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:49:19 +0000

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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Adapting SEO for a Semantic Search Future

Angela Guess — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:32 +0000

Ryan DeShazer of Search Insider recently shared his insights on how SEO needs to adapt or in order to stay current with Google’s planned semantic search updates. DeShazer lists three pieces of advice. The first is, “Become a content strategist – technical on- and off-page factors will continue to see a decline in importance. The most compelling and desirable content will win. I can’t help but think how this new thinking gels perfectly with the concept of storytelling and content curation through social media channels. This construct would be the ideal ying-yang relationship to content marketing across search and social channels.” continued…

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