Aaron Bradley of SEOSkeptic reports, “On Beet.TV, Andy Plesser recently featured a short but fascinating video of Michael Zimbalist, Vice President of Research and Development Operations at the New York Times, talking with Joanna O’Connell of Forrester about a prototype linked data search engine being developed by the Times. Zimbalist begins by talking about the great asset that is the New York Times Index, and the relationship between the Index’s metadata and linked data.”

Zimbalist stated, “For almost the entire life of the newspaper … we’ve been annotating that.  We’ve had the Times Index – you’ve probably seen it at the library, these big fat red books so you could go and look up the Index and find what issue of the Times and what section there was a story about that.  So that really provides the basis for some exceptionally rich metadata that’s been consistent over the history of the organization. So we’re able to look at the text of articles as data, as very unstructured data, and begin to put some structure around it.  And we do it in a lot of really different ways.  So we have our metadata and our index now rationalized.  So all the terms in the index match up to all the terms in our metadata, and we’ve connected that to this linked data cloud.  There’s this linked data movement that’s trying to treat the entire web as this database of information.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy New York Times