The W3C RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three new last call working drafts: RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. Ivan Herman reports, “Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents or in HTML. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice Web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.” Read more

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Simply put, RDFa is another syntax for RDF. The interesting aspect of RDFa is that it is embedded in HTML. This means that you can state what things on your HTML page actually mean. For example, you can specify that a certain text is the title of a blog post or it’s the name of a product or it’s the price for a certain product. This is starting to be commonly known as “adding semantic markup”.

Historically, RDFa was specified only for XHTML. Currently, RDFa 1.1 is specified for XHTML and HTML5. Additionally, RDFa 1.1 works for any XML-based language such as SVG. Recently, RDFa Lite was introduced as “a small subset of RDFa consisting of a few attributes that may be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup tasks.” It is important to note that RDFa is not the only way to add semantics to your webpages. Microdata and Microformats are other options, and I will discuss this later on. As a reminder, you can publish your data as Linked Data through RDFa. Inside your markup, you can link to other URIs or others can link to your HTML+RDFa webpages.

Why publish RDFa? Read more

Elf Sternberg recently proposed a Grand Unifying Theory to make Backbone and RDFa compatible. He writes, “Last night, I was working on a little demonstration project, teaching myself the intricacies of Backbone/CouchDB interaction. I wrote my first CouchDB views and figured out what they’re for, which is a massive step toward world domination and all that. I was working on the retrieval layer, and thinking about the create/update features, when I said to myself, ‘Hey, Self, can you use that sexy new RDFa stuff to handle the create/update feature?’ I’ve been thinking about this because I have a different project that’s very RDFa-heavy, and the details of implementation have been challenging. But no, I had to come to a different conclusion: RDFa and Backbone.js are incompatible.” Read more

Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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Facebook today posted that users now officially can upgrade their profiles to its Facebook Timeline by heading here. Timeline, as Mark Zuckerberg described in September, is Facebook’s way of helping uses curate the stories of their lives, calling out the most meaningful events and recent highlights. During the F8 Developers’ Conference, he said that Facebook had “rethought from the ground up the heart of the Facebook experience.”

The Open Graph protocol, based on RDFa, provides power to the experience, enabling applications to focus on filling out user Timelines with lightweight activities, and on discovering new things through friends in what Zuckerberg at the time called a frictionless experience. As an example, he noted the debut of the Open Graph Spotify music app that adds to a user’s Timeline the songs she listens to, radio stations, and albums.

Other Open Graph app launch partners announced at the event in the fall were The Daily, Dailymotion, Earbits, The Guardian, Hulu, iHeartRadio, The Independent, Izlesene, Jelli, My Video, Netflix, Rdio, Slacker, Songza, The Washington Post, and Yahoo. Others, such as The Huffington Post, joined later. In late November, Facebook said that the publishers building social news apps to help users see what their friends or reading or to view past top articles are seeing good early results.

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Users of Prestashop, the popular open source e-commerce package that powers over 100,ooo shops, now have easy access to semantic markup through the release of a free extension module from Makolab S.A. The extension adds markup from the GoodRelations vocabulary using RDFa syntax to the product item page templates. Read more

Ivan Herman recently posted a demonstration on the W3C blog of a new feature that he has added to the RDFa 1.1 Distiller. Herman writes, “Up to today, the possible serializations were RDF/XML, Turtle, and N Triples. Although not yet final, I decided to add a JSON-LD serialization, too, in spite of the fact that JSON-LD is not yet final either (it is under development by a W3C Community Group). However, adding this to the system it shows the potentials of this combination.” Read more

Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy, has moved the proverbial ball forward yet again by creating an implementation of the schema.org vocabulary in BestBuy’s Black Friday web pages.

First, a bit of history…

Myers began incorporating structured data into BestBuy web pages in 2009. Starting initially with basic store information (hours of operation, location, contact information), Myers soon expanded the project to include product pages, music data, and the 600,000+ item product catalog. This work quickly became a widely cited use-case for semantic markup. In particular, it brought a lot of attention to the RDFa syntax and the GoodRelations vocabulary. The effort resulted in improved page rankings, richer display of BestBuy search listings in browsers, and — after putting user-friendly tools in the hands of store managers —  enabled Myers to tackle the retail problem of Open Box returns.

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Last month, we reported on the new RDFa 1.1 Lite proposal by Ben Adida. In our recent podcast on Schema.org with guest Ramanathan V. Guha, we touched on the topic of RDFa Lite as well.

Today, schema.org spokesperson Dan Brickley posted that “we’re pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org’s structured data vocabulary. W3C’s RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly ‘Lite’ view of RDFa.”

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