Three months ago on April 2nd, we wrote that “RDFa is the gateway drug to the semantic web”. This is an exciting story. RDFa is crossing the chasm into the mainstream. Our mission at SemanticWeb.com and the SemanticWeb Summit is to be “The Voice of Semantic Web Business”.

The emphasis is on business. Semantic Web technologies, like most new technology, has been funded in academia. Now the funding baton is being passed to business, both enterprise and startups.

Mainstream adoption requires a KISS value proposition. RDFa has that. RDFa helps your content be discovered. It cannot get simpler or more mainstream than that!

So we want to cover the news on RDFa, even if individual news items are not worth an entire blog post. So we monitor Twitter to identify the stories that look interesting to us.

We give our snapshot commentary on why this is interesting.

RDFa News This Week

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When Google promotes RDFa, the world listens.

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The news is old – that Best Buy is using RDFa. But that the news is reported in Chinese is significant. China is a huge market for ecommerce and it works differently. For a start, Google is not dominant in China. Classic word search does not translate well to non-Latin character sets. So the implications of RDFa based ecommerce in China (and Japan and Korea) seems interesting. The story must have been picked up by a Chinese aggregator as it appears many, many times on Titter.

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Kingsely does a good Tweet summary of RDFa.

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The open source community fills in the holes around Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol. This may take some wind out of Twitter Annotation’s sails.

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Practical guide to a simple but everyday problem. How does the consumer of video know what the license is? This enables apps to consume as per the rules defined by the publisher. See video below.

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Standards that evolve in the marketplace (not just the committees) tend to be the most robust.

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Links to good Read Write Web article on this news. Best Buy’s implementation may become the reference system for a while.

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One example (among many) of Drupal community getting stuck into RDFa (and using SOLR for search).

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POWDER looks like a useful tool for webmasters who want to create lots of RDFa without hand coding.

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Nuff said.

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At least somebody is trying! (Not all sites run on Drupal).

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Good question, was wondering about this as well. My guess is that messy/simplified use of standards get fixed at a middleware level. That is happening with Twitter Annotations and OGP. RIF (Rule Interchange Format) maybe the standard way to do this. RIF is a (so far) obscure part of the semantic web stack that may become more visible because of this.

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Now that is interesting news. About time.

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Thanks Mills for that news. Even with budget cutbacks, the momentum for open government data seems good.

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More push to semantic ecommerce.

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For those who can get stuck into the evolving standards.

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Clever bit of positioning – Web 2.0/social media is a budget line item!

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Google will search whatever is on the web. Today that is mostly microformats. But RDFa momentum is changing that.

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Great example of how fast innovation happens thanks to real time tools such as Twitter. Developer says “I wish” and another developer says “here it is”.

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More evidence of use for SEO (note DIVX article requires registration).

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Semantic ECommerce, using Best Buy example to evangelize.

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More semantic ecommerce traction.

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