The Semantic Technology & Business Conference begins in a few short days. If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late, and if you haven’t looked at the program recently, be sure to check out some of these exciting late-breaking additions…

KEYNOTE:
What Google is Doing with Structured Data
Jason Douglas, Group Product Manager, Knowledge Graph, Google

HOT TOPIC PANEL:
WebSchemas: Schema.org and Vocabulary Collaboration

Dan Brickley, Developer Advocate, Google
R.V. Guha, Google Fellow, Google
Sandro Hawke, W3C Technical Staff, W3C/MIT

(More panelists TBA)

BREAKOUT SESSIONS:

Building Your SmartData Accelerator
Robert Kruse, Managing Partner, SmartDataAccelerator
Gene Mishchenko, Lead Information Architect, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services

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Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD), and there are programs taking place all around the world from Bangalore, India to Washington, DC. The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and users with different disabilities.

GAAD is the brainchild of Joe Devon, a Los Angeles based technologist and entrepreneur. Devon says, “The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start. Awareness comes first.”

Last year, I wrote a piece about the inaugural Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD), and the strong connections between Semantic Web and Assistive Technology. Or rather, I posited that there were connections that were inherent, but not being maximized, or even explored.

One year later, I’m very pleased to report that things are progressing! There are now formal efforts to connect Semantic and Assistive Technologies.

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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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On Friday, February 8, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Eric Franzon, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about libraries, an area that has seen a great deal of activity in the Linked Data space recently.

“The Linkers” were joined by a very special guest to discuss what’s been happening in the library world: Karen Coyle.
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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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Recently, a new resource appeared on the Web to help developers navigate the waters around various approaches to adding semantic markup to websites and applications. We caught up with the creators of the newly launched  structured-data.org, to learn more about this project.  They are:

Stéphane Corlosquet, OpenSpring.net

Gregg Kellogg, Principal, Kellogg Associates

Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO, Digital Bazaar, Inc.

Q: What is “Structured Data on the Web” (the site and the concept)?

GK: We wanted to provide a place for people to learn about the different ways in which publishers can add semantic information to their web sites and applications. There is confusion in the marketplace, partly due to the introduction of schema.org, which has raised the awareness of structured data with web developers. structured-data.org is a one-stop-shop to learn about the different mechanisms available to developers to take advantage of this.
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Raven has released a new tool for easily creating HTML with schema.org microdata – the Schema Creator. According to Raven, “Structured data is a way for search engine machines to make sense of content in your HTML. Google and other search engines created a structured data standard called schema.org. If you’re like most web designers or SEOs, you might find schema.org a little difficult to grasp at first. That’s why we created Schema Creator—to help you quickly build and get started with schema.org microdata. We’ve included some of the most popular schemas for you to create. After you create a schema, you can copy and paste the code to your site or add additional item properties to it.” Read more

If you have been following the news from the world of web standards, linked data, and/or semantic web, you certainly have heard about schema.org. If you missed it, schema.org is a collaboration of Google, Yahoo! and Bing and is a way to include structured data in web pages. The vocabulary includes descriptive terms for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, locations, and more – there are over 100 terms. According to the Schema.org website, the goal is “to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.”

Announced just before The San Francisco Semantic Technology Conference, Schema.org was the most heated discussion topic the conference has seen in some time, and since then has been talked about extensively in news publications, podcasts, email discussion boards, and Q&A systems. (In case you missed all the hubub, following is a timeline of some of the early reactions.)

There is little doubt that schema.org will continue to be a topic of conversation for some time to come, but as we are now about one month in, we wanted to look in on the discussion and provide an aggregation of some of the many voices and opinions we have heard, including some very recent developments and newly available video of the Google Rich Snippets session from SemTech.

Be sure to see the bottom of this post for the latest!

Timeline

June 2 – schema.org is announced by Google, Yahoo, and Bing

June 2 – A public discussion forum is opened as a Google Group

June 2 – Mike Bergman – Structured Web Gets Massive Boost/

June 3 -  schema.rdfs.org is announced. This was a quick response from the Linked Data community “to express the terms provided by the Schema.org consortium in RDF.” Of particular interest may be the various tools that are in development by community members.

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