Rotten Tomatoes is a great source of movie reviews. They just implemented RDFa and Open Graph Protocol. That is fast moving for a major site. Hat tip to Manu Sporny who tweeted this. About one hour later, the Teaching Your Dragon to dance had 155 Likes. And within the hour, Kingsely Idehen had mashed up the site and put it through his URI burner.

Semantic Web time moves fast.

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Yahoo! was the first major search engine to wholeheartedly embrace the Semantic Web with SearchMonkey, which can make use of metadata embedded inside web pages using either microformats, eRDF or RDFa. The future of SearchMonkey is a little cloudy in the wake of Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo! last year – cleared in February by the Justice Department – but one can’t ignore the footprint Yahoo has made on the Semantic Web. So the SemanticWeb Blog caught up with Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research – who was instrumental in SearchMonkey’s development as well as that of the AB Meta RDFa-based format for annotating pages about things – to get his perspective about the impact of Facebook’s Open Graph Markup, which lets publishers provide structured data about their web pages.

SemanticWeb Blog: Since you had a hand both in Search Monkey and AB Meta, you’re in the sweet spot to tell us what you think Open Graph’s impact around semantic markup will be compared to what the impact of other efforts have been.

Mika: We welcome the OpenGraph proposal lead by Facebook, which builds on the RDFa standard and therefore can be directly consumed by all tools (including search engines, but also browser extensions) supporting RDFa.

The approach they follow is similar to AB Meta in that it requires publishers to modify only the HEAD of the HTML page. This method is simple, but it has the disadvantage that the same data is duplicated within the page. As a search provider, we also prefer “contextual awareness”, i.e. the ability to tie structured information to the relevant parts of the page. Compared to AB Meta, the Open Graph proposal makes further simplifications for the convenience of publishers.

Some of the simplifications mean that the data is not ideally represented, which can only be amended by additional processing. Despite these issues (which might be addressed in a future version), we value Facebook’s effort in building out the Semantic Web by motivating publishers, not only through a simplified approach, but also by providing additional services of value, such as social recommendations.

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Empire is an implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) for RDF and the Semantic Web. Instead of another implementation of relational databases, Empire implements JPA for RDF and SPARQL, thus allowing developers who are familiar with JPA, but not with semantic web techologies like RDF, to make an easy transition into this brave, new world. JPA is a specification for managing Java objects, most commonly with an RDBMS; it’s industry standard for Java ORMs.

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