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The Future of E-Commerce Data Interpretation: Semantic Markup, or Computer Vision?

Marc Mezzacca — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:55:18 +0000

How will webpage data be interpreted in the next few years? The Semantic Web community has high hopes for ever evolving semantic standards to help systems identify and extract rich data found on the web, ultimately making it more useful. With the announcement of Schema.org support for GoodRelations in November, it seems clear semantic progress is now being made on the e-commerce front, and at an accelerated rate. Martin Hepp, founder of GoodRelations, estimates the rate of adoption of rich, structured e-commerce data to significantly increase this year.

However, Mike Tung, founder and CEO of a data parsing service called DiffBot, has less faith that the standards necessary for a true Semantic Web will ever be completely and effectively implemented. In an interview on Xconomy he states that for semantic standards to work correctly content owners must markup the content once for the web and a second time for the semantic standards. This requires extra work, and affords them the opportunity to perform content stuffing (SEO spam).

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Latest Version of RDFLib Released

Angela Guess — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:00:47 +0000

Ivan Herman reports, “This has been in the works for a while, but it is done now: the latest (3.4.0 version) of the python RDFLib library has just been released, and it includes and RDFa 1.1, microdata, and turtle-in-HTML parser. In other words, the user can add structured data to an HTML file, and that will be parsed into RDF and added to an RDFLib Graph structure. This is a significant step, and thanks to Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, who helped me adding those parsers into the main distribution.”

He goes on, “I have written a blog last summer on some of the technical details of those parsers; although there has been updates since then, essentially following the minor changes that the RDFa Working has defined for RDFa, as well as changes/updates on the microdata->RDF algorithm, the general approach described in that blog remains valid, and it is not necessary to repeat it here. continued…

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Good-Bye to 2012: A Look Back At The Year In Semantic Tech, Part 1

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:08:15 +0000

Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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Search Engine Yandex Gets More Personal, And More Semantic, Too

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:56:16 +0000

Image courtesy of Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Search engine Yandex this week added personalization capabilities for Eastern European users’ search results. It analyses their online behavior including their search history, clicks on search results, and language preferences for its suggestions.

Kaliningrad is the name of the latest edition of Yandex’ personalized search engine. It uses that information to make suggestions and rank search results individually tailored for each user, showing book lovers that do a search on Harry Potter links related to the books, while those who prefer movies get film-oriented link fare.

Semantic markup didn’t play a role in the development of the technology, Yandex technical product manager and developer advocate Alexander Shubin says. But it can be applied for future enhancements, he notes. The new personalization reportedly leverages Yandex’ machine-learning-based query and search results algorithms “Spectrum” and “MatrixNet” to train the results to users’ requirements.

That said, Yandex has been diving deeper into semantic web waters. Beyond taking advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, Shubin provides this update: “We enhanced our markup validator to understand all the markup (Open Graph, schema.org, RDFa, microformats). It is universal now (as Google’s or Bing’s instruments).”

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Google Debuts Data Highlighter: An Easy Way Into Structured Data

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:55:40 +0000

Structured data makes the Web go around. Search engines love it when webmasters mark up page content. Google’s rich snippets, for instance, leverages sites’ use of microdata (preferred format), or RDFa or microformats: It makes it possible to highlight in a few lines specific types of content in search results, to give users some insight about what’s on the page and its relationship to their queries – prep time for a recipe, for instance.

Plenty of web sites generated from structured data haven’t added HTML markup to their pages, though, so they aren’t getting the benefits that come with search engines understanding the information on those web pages.

Maybe that will change, now that Google has introduced Data Highlighter, an easy way to tell its search engine about the structured data behind their web pages. A video posted by Google product management director Jack Menzel gives the snapshot: “Data Highlighter is a point- and-click tool that allows any webmaster to show Google the patterns of structured data on their pages without modifying the pages themselves,” he says.

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Adding Rich Snippets and Semantic Markup to Your Site

Angela Guess — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:00:31 +0000

Barbara Starr of SearchEngineLand reports, “Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an illustrative guide highlighting currently available Chrome extensions, which you can leverage to both test on-site markup as well as expose any information regarding your competitors. An example is illustrated [above], and what follows is a guide to getting the information.” continued…

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Should Microdata Become a W3C Standard?

Angela Guess — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:00:25 +0000

Manu Sporny recently voiced his personal objection to the W3C microdata candidate recommendation. He writes, “The HTML Working Group at the W3C is currently trying to decide if they should transition the Microdata specification to the next stage in the standardization process. There has been a call for consensus to transition the spec to the Candidate Recommendation stage. From a standards perspective, this is a huge mistake and sends the wrong signal to Web developers everywhere. The problem is that we already have a set of specifications that are official W3C recommendations that do what Microdata does and more. RDFa 1.1 became an official W3C Recommendation last summer.”

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GoodRelations Fully Integrated with Schema.org

Eric Franzon — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:54 +0000

Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

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Mobile App Mila Uses Semantics To Match Micro-Entrepreneurs To Social Media Customer Leads

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:44:27 +0000

A mobile app released this week aims to give micro-entrepreneurs a hand-up when it comes to financial interactions with customers, as well as sussing prospects out to start with.

The app, called Mila, is a blend of two companies’ technologies: One of them is Core Systems, which has leveraged its history of providing enterprise resource planning (ERP) –related applications for large companies that use SAP software to enabling mobile invoicing functionality to small startups. The other is Knowledgehives, which developed the semantic technology Mila uses for matching micro-entrepreneurs with business leads.

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The Evolution of Semantic Technology In Publishing

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:06:28 +0000

“The idea of the Big S Semantic Web seems to have fallen off by the wayside in publishing as people are just trying to structure their data,” says Barbara McGlamery, taxonomist at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

McGlamery, who will be presenting a case study comparing her experiences in two publishing houses that took opposite approaches to the semantic web at the SemTech conference in NYC this month, says that the path most publishers are on now “hardly seems like the same beast” as the one she formerly knew. A few years back, the focus was on RDF, OWL, full-blown ontologies and inferencing engines, whereas today “it’s schema.org and we’re using microdata, not even RDFa.”

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Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool Revised and Renamed Structured Data Testing Tool

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:16:16 +0000

Google has released the structured data testing tool, a new and renamed version of its rich snippet testing tool. According to a blog by Yong Zhu, on behalf of the rich snippets testing tool team, improvements include:

How rich snippets are displayed in the testing tool to better match how they appear in search results;
A new visual design to make it clearer what structured data it can extract from the page, and how that may be shown in search results;
And the availability of the tool in languages other than English (French, Spanish, Arabic, for example) to help webmasters from around the world build structured-data-enabled websites.

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Google Introduces Structured Data Dashboard

Eric Franzon — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:58:31 +0000

Google has announced the addition of a “Structured Data Dashboard” as a new feature in its Webmaster Tools offerings. The Dashboard gives webmasters greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for a given website. This will no doubt come as good news to people wanting confirmation that Google was consuming the structured data being published.

Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool has been around for a while and allows webmasters to see how their semantic markup might appear in a Rich Snippet. There are tools that allow developers to test semantic markup during the development process. However, until now there has not been a good way for a webmaster to see how (or even if) Google was consuming the structured markup in a given site.

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Schema.org adds “Additional Type” Property

Eric Franzon — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:44:43 +0000

Dan Brickley announced today that schema.org has added the property “additionalType” to the basic building block, schema.org/Thing. As Brickley says, “The additionalType property makes it possible for Microdata-based publishers to list several relevant types, even when the types are from diverse, independent schemas. This is important for schema.org as it allows our markup to be mixed with other systems, without making it too hard for consuming applications to interpret. A description can use a schema.org type as a base, but mention others (e.g. from DBpedia, Freebase, eventually Wikidata…) to improve the specificity and detail of the description.”

As RDFa already allows for use of multiple vocabularies (through the ‘typeOf’ attribute), it is recommended that RDFa publishers use that native syntax.

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Common Crawl Corpus Update Makes Web Crawl Data More Efficient, Approachable For Users To Explore

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 11:00:16 +0000

Common Crawl now is providing its 2012 corpus of web crawl data not just as .ARC files, but also is releasing the metadata files (JSON-based metadata with all the links from every page crawled, metatags, headers and so on) as well as text output.

Semantic web projects that use its corpus include the work of Web Data Commons, which last month created a new analysis on vocabulary usage by pay-level domain in its microdata and RDFa dataset.

With the metadata files, users don’t have to extract the link graph from the raw crawl, which, says Common Crawl Chief Architect Ahad Rana, is “pretty significant for the community. They don’t have to expend all this CPU power to extract the links. And metadata files are a much smaller set of data than the raw corpus.” Similarly, the full text output that users now can run analysis over is significantly smaller than the .ARC file raw content.

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Microdata or RDFa Lite? Dispelling the Myths

Angela Guess — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:28:08 +0000

Manu Sporny recently shared his views regarding the difference between RDFa Lite and microdata. Sporny writes, “RDFa 1.1 became an official Web specification last month. Google started supporting RDFa in Google Rich Snippets some time ago and has recently announced that they will support RDFa Lite for schema.org as well. These announcements have led to a weekly increase in the number of times the following question is asked by Web developers on Twitter and Google+: ‘What should I implement on my website? Microdata or RDFa?’ This blog post attempts to answer the question once and for all. It dispels some of the myths around the Microdata vs. RDFa debate and outlines how the two languages evolved to solve the same problem in almost exactly the same way.” continued…

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