Jon Mitchell recently looked into the implications of Google’s decision to start incorporating semantic search into its keyword search system. He writes, “This is bound to shake up the way today’s keyword-driven search engine optimization works. The essence of the SEO game is tailoring page titles, URLs, topic tags and body text to the words and phrases people use to search the Web. Google only has to match the keywords in the query to the keywords on the Web using a lexical database. That’s relatively easy, and it allows humans to game the system.” 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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In a post that touts the value of adding semantic markup using HTML 5 microdata for SEO benefits, Ben Truyman explains, “Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides others, like search engines or browsers, with more information about the contents of a page. This allows them to handle data in new and interesting ways. For example, a product detail page may list out a product’s SKU, pricing, reviews and availability — but there’s no real way for Google’s search engine crawlers to know exactly what that information means. With Microdata, we can explicitly tell Google how much our products cost and what rating our users gave it.” 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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I hate to even mention how quickly Summer is passing, but as we head into August, it’s time to start making plans for the busy Fall event season. September is particularly full of Semantic Tech events.

September 14, in New York City, the Semantic Web Media Summit will take place. A half-day meeting focused on uses of Semantic Web in media, advertising, and publishing, the event is produced by SemanticWeb.com, Lotico.com and our parent company, MediaBistro. With a keynote by Mike Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive, and contributions from a stellar group of presenters, the program promises to be a must-attend event for anyone in the New York area interested in how Semantic Technology is changing the media world.  OpenAmplify is sponsoring the conference.

September 21-23, DC-2011, the eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will take place at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

Also on Sept. 21, the folks at Schema.org are planning a workshop in Silicon Valley. There are still few details available about this event.

September 26-27, The London Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) takes place at the Hotel Russell. This two-day executive conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from the Keynote speakers John O’Donovan (Press Association), Martin Hepp (Hepp Research), Steve Harris (Garlik), and Dennis E. Wisnosky, U.S. Department of Defense.

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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SemTech 2011 Coverage

Barbara H. Starr

In Barbara Starr’s (Ontologica) session this week at Semtech 2011, San Francisco, she presented a detailed timeline outlining the adoption of RDFa and semantic search enhancements by the major search engines.  In addition to mentioning the rapid growth of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, she showed a movement by the search engines, in particular Google, to support semantic search. The movement is going away from a web of documents with hyperlinks to a web of data and semantic links. Her timeline showed the evolution from search engine support for structured data formats such as Resource Description Framework-in-attributes (RDFa) through last week’s announcement of the Schema.org alliance.

In her talk, she demonstrated how the use of semantic technology in commercial searches can be accomplished by doing a query for “Barack Obama Birthday” on both Google and Bing.  Google returns answers from typical sources like answers.com and Wikipedia, as shown below in Fig. 1.0.

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Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, acknowledged that he had to make some last-minute alterations to the presentation he gave yesterday at SemTech on the practical business uses of RDFa for search engines and beyond. They were required in light of the schema.org announcement that came at the end of last week. Myers worked the new standard for creating and supporting a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in microdata into a slide that showed how the Semantic Web can bring equilibrium to the pendulum that tends to swing between the shiny-ball stuff of the web that’s tailored for human consumption and the back-end keyword- and metadata-stuffing that’s done for the benefits of machine-reading.

But RDFa still takes top billing.

schema.org, Myers told the audience, is “search-centric and what I believe what the Semantic Web really entails is knowledge and insight,” he said.

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