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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SemTechBiz is Less Than 3 Weeks Away

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 !

Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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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.

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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The W3C reports that three RDFa specifications have been proposed as recommendations. The article states, “The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Proposed Recommendations for RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language. The group also published a draft of the RDFa 1.1 Primer today.” Read more

Leigh Dodds has posted a paper regarding layered data and RDF. Dodds introduces the paper thus: “Two years ago I wrote a short paper about ‘layering’ data but for various reasons never got round to putting it online. The paper tried to capture some of my thinking at the time about the opportunities and approaches for publishing and aggregating data on the web. I’ve finally got around to uploading it and you can read it here. I’ve made a couple of minor tweaks in a few places but I think it stands up well, even given the recent pace of change around data publishing and re-use. I still think the abstraction that it describes is not only useful but necessary to take us forward on the next wave of data publishing.” Read more

Wavii made waves when it launched  its automated, algorithm-driven news aggregation service in April, which has been billed as making Facebook out of Google. But what makes Wavii work? When The Semantic Web Blog found a picture in Wavii.com’s Flickr photostream featuring the word “predicates” on a white board, it was time to discover whether Semantic Web standards had anything to do with its engine.

Turns out, RDF is not at play here. But natural language processing certainly factors in, albeit from the perspective of information extraction and being almost entirely machine-learning based rather than deep-parsing oriented. The service’s technology is influenced by the expert machine-reading NLP work being done at the University of Washington, where Wavii advisor Oren Etzioni is a professor of computer science.

But Wavii CEO and founder Adrian Aoun can credit growing up in a household where his father was a linguist — a student of Noam Chomsky – for originally sparking his interest in how language works. Whenever his dad would have a debate about a language construct with his fellow MIT buddies, he says, “they’d turn to me and say which one sounds better….The irony is that they’re arguing over the rules, but they acknowledge the right answer is whatever humans do.”

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While much of the publishing industry still is getting up to speed on what semantic technology can do for business, it’s already deep within the DNA of The Tribune Company – to the point where Keith DeWeese, Director, Information and Semantics Management, can comfortably use the word “ontology” in discussions with non-tech employees, and enjoy the fact that they’re equally comfortable using it themselves.

DeWeese has been with the company since 2007, putting in place a sophisticated semantic system for auto-tagging and indexing content using natural language processing and controlled vocabularies, and leveraging its taxonomy for projects such as providing advanced search functionality. Thanks to building a collaborative communication channel with Tribune executives, producers, and editors, “now I actually am in meetings with executives who say how exciting it is that we now can be part of a community of people applying semantic technologies to content,” he says. “The other day I was at a meeting where a top executive used the word ontology all the time. I kept smiling and later I thanked her.”

Closely engaging with his business customers also is helping make it possible to push the semantic vision further at the company.

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Bob DuCharme, author and speaker, has provided an excellent example of one of the benefits RDF has over XML. In his example, DuCharme shows how to perform a simple federated query with RDF across two different address books. He writes, “Once, at an XML Summer School session, I was giving a talk about semantic web technology to a group that included several presenters from other sessions. This included Henry Thompson, who I’ve known since the SGML days. He was still a bit skeptical about RDF, and said that RDF was in the same situation as XML—that if he and I stored similar information using different vocabularies, we’d still have to convert his to use the same vocabulary as mine or vice versa before we could use our data together.” Read more

Rob Styles has written an article regarding how semantic technologies can be effectively applied to the third V of Big Data: variety. (The other two Vs are volume and velocity.) Styles writes, “That third V of the Big Data puzzle is where I’ve been helping people use graphs of data (and that’s what RDF is, a graph model). Graphs are great where you have a variety of data that you want to link up. Especially if you want to extend the data often and if you want to extend the data programmatically — i.e. you don’t want to commit to a complete, constraining schema up-front. The other aspect of that variety in data that graphs help with is querying. As Jem Rayfield (BBC News & Sport) explains, using a graph makes the model simpler to develop and query.” 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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