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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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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It’s time to get semantic with your Thanksgiving meal – or what’s left of it. To that end, we toured some semantically-powered foodie services to get some ideas about what to serve up for the big day. Maybe you’ll even find some things you just may never have considered without some semantic web services making it easy to pinpoint to your tastes (literally) or nutritional concerns, or that let you bring to the table the latest delicacies getting high-fives on the social web sentiment scene.

Here we go:

• Google. For some Thanksgiving-ers, it’s simply off “to the Google,” as the dear family member in charge of our celebration says, to suss out recipes that have been marked up with rich snippets or schema.org microdata. Tired of the same old green bean casserole and plain mashed potatoes each year? Narrow the search engine to its recipes focus and you’ll find a few choice nuggets of Thanksgiving’s best vegetable side dishes – the traditional ones are there, like Martha Stewart’s garlic mashed potatoes (for a bit of a twist) and, yup, the tried-and-true green bean casserole. But you’re not likely to have thought of a pickled root vegetable salad before, courtesy of Cooking Channel TV, are you? Be prepared to set aside an hour and thirty minutes, though, to make it happen.   Read more

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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Are you wondering why your product pages don’t stand out in search results like those from Amazon (shown below) or other competing e-commerce websites? These expanded results are commonly known as Rich Snippets (as named by Google) and are the result of having your HTML structured correctly with semantic markup. Whether you’re savvy to HTML5 and the latest design trends, or you haven’t updated your website code in years, this is article will explain why it’s important you structure your data properly utilizing semantic standards.

There are a number of ways to structure your data to make it more relevant to search engines, as well as social media sites. As an e-commerce retailer it is important to understand which of these standards you should consider including in your website. You should take some time to ensure you are implementing semantic markup, and doing it correctly. It has the power to better inform potential customers with upfront knowledge prior to landing on your site. Customers can see product reviews, pricing and stock information, and even images before clicking through to your website. This can lead to increased click-through rates, improve conversions, and generally enhance your SEO objectives.

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Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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I’m very happy to announce that the World Wide Web Consortium’s RDB2RDF Working Group, in which I participate as an Invited Expert,  has published two Candidate Recommendations: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF. This has been a long road and we still have some ways to go. The standardization process goes back to the W3C Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases, which took place in October 2007. The W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group followed afterwards. After almost 5 years, we are on track to have a standard. However, what is this standard bringing to the table?

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GoodRelations has published a free semantic search engine optimization extension for xt:Coomerce. According to the website, “This free extension module for xt:Commerce automatically adds rich data-markup to your shop pages so that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing can display richer item previews in the search results (“Rich Snippets”) with information about prices, availability, delivery options, images, etc. This typically increases Click-Through-Rates (CTR) by up to 30%. At the same time, your shop will be more accessible for browser extensions and mobile applications.” Read more

Yes you are right, one of the prime reasons for this post is an excuse to show some stunning pictures from nature.  However, there is also good reason to explore a Linked Data example, provided by Pete DeVries of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, in his recent submission to the W3C public-lod mailing list.

Pete shows a good example of the benefits of Linked Data.  He provides links to information about the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) from several Linked Data datasets, each of which provide different, but overlapping views.

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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