A recent article informs online retailers that “Starting now, you’re going to need good structured markup on your X/HTML in addition to your white hat tactics. I see structured markup as being equally important to authoritative inbound links as a ranking factor when optimizing content. Why? Because search robots are designed to serve search engine users by matching their search query expectations, known as user intent. These bots are machines, and they’re trying to discern the human mind’s evaluation of information in answer to human-entered keywords.” Read more

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

A new article from CTOvision.com provides some insight into HTML5 and RDF for those of us who don’t work on the technical side of things. The article explains that “since the data on the web is often in forms that make it computationally complex to parse or recognize, new HTML tags and standards had to be developed and integrated with HTML5 to provide this functionality.” Read more

The RDFa Working Group has
published a Last Call Working Draft of RDFa Core 1.1. RDFa Core is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language, with an emphasis on HTML-family languages, the Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) Format, the Open Document Format and other Web-enabled document
formats. The specification enables the human-readable and machine-readable markup of people, places, events, products, recipes, social networks, and many other concepts that are frequently published on the web. RDFa 1.1 improves upon RDFa 1.0 by adding a
number of features requested by people to ease authoring.
The announcement as a Last Call Working Draft is an open invitation to
the general public to review and provide feedback on the specification via the RDFa Working
Group mailing list. The deadline for review feedback is 6 December.

HTML 5: Spyware built in? LubbockOnline.com (blog) HTML 5, which I suppose could be said to be ushering in Web 3.0, makes that much harder. It is already difficult to take steps to protect your privacy. … and more »

The Semantic Web: An Explanation in Plain English Technorati The Semantic Web is a big step toward Web 3.0, where the ultimate goal is to make Web content more machine-friendly. Most Websites are produced using HTML, …

Date: September 15, 2010, 11:00AM (1 hour)
Register: View the recorded webcast
Q&A: Q & A – Callimachus: Semantic Web Apps Made Easy

RDFa makes it easy for Web publishers to expose data on the Web, but RDFa can also make it easy to develop Web data applications. Watch how easy it is to replace complex data schemas and their SQL queries with simple RDFa attributes in your HTML markup! In this webcast, James Leigh, a lead developer (with David Wood) on the Callimachus Project, will show us how a Web developer can create semantically-enabled Web applications with a minimal knowledge of the internals of the Semantic Web and SQL. For further details, see Callimachus Project at http://www.callimachusproject.org. SUPPORTING MATERIAL This webcast walks you through some of the sample applications with Callimachus. To find out more about these sample applications and to download them, visit: http://code.google.com/p/callimachus/wiki/SampleApplicationInstructions Callimachus uses the Turtle syntax for its configuration files. The Turtle syntax is explained here:  http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/ RDFa is used in the template language of Callimachus. An introduction to RDFa (the data format) can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ During this webcast some browser extensions are used, they can be downloaded here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mgekankhbggjkjpcbhacjgflbacnpljm?hl=en https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/187590/

Presenters:

James Leigh
Independent Software Consultant
James Leigh is an independent Software Consultant based in Toronto. James is a co-creator of Callimachus and is involved in other public semantic Web projects, such as the PURL server and Sesame store. James has been building web applications for ten years with emphasis on performance and technology integration. His experience modelling business problems and concepts in software has enabled his clients to rapidly move from concepts to prototypes to production systems.

In order for the Semantic Web to become a reality and success, there needs to be data on the web published as Linked Data. However, data on the web is not a new thing. People have been publishing raw data for a long time as XML, CSV or even spreadsheets. Data can also be accessed through APIs.  But where does most of the data on the web come from? Relational Databases!

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Introduction

Semantic Universe has begun producing linked data for its Enterprise Data World and Semantic Technology Conferences. There were several motivations behind this effort.

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What Is HTML 5? Practical Ecommerce The semantic interpretation of HTML 4 has always been a subject of debate among web standards experts. Thankfully, HTML 5 offers a significantly expanded …

What is Open Graph? LWN.net RDF is the “semantic web” technology created by the W3C; RDFa is a technique for embedding it in a specific way, within special, structured HTML attributes. … and more »