Metadata for a Web of Data – Scott Davis on RDFa and Microformats

A very informative and entertaining presentation by Scott Davis of ThirstyHead on using RDFa and Microformats to build services that are OF the Web, not just ON the Web. Presentation slides can be found here.

glenn

RDF/RDFa in Drupal 7 – Stephane Corlosquet presentation from April 2010

A very nice presentation by Stephane Corlosquet from April 2010 titled The RDFa initiative in Drupal 7, and how it will impact the Semantic Web. The slides accompanying the presentation can be found here.

Also, a collection of screencasts on Drupal and RDF/RDFa are available below:

• Semantic Drupal — State of Drupal keynote, DrupalConSF 2010
• The Semantic Web and Drupal, part 1 – November 2009
• The Semantic Web and Drupal, part 2 – November 2009

All building on the vision first articulated by Dries Buytaert at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

glenn

Best Buy – using RDFa to increase visibility of products & services

This is a pretty well-discussed example in the Semantic Web community, but just wanted to briefly explore how Best Buy is using RDFa to semantically markup its web pages to increase the visibility of its products and services.

Let’s look at an article from ReadWriteWeb from July 2010 titled How Best Buy is Using The Semantic Web. This article is based on an interview with Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com. There’s several things I’d like to highlight.

The Why – Focus on Business Objectives

OK, so this may go without saying, but the Semantic Web, for businesses, needs to be about solving business problems, not about a cool technology. And sure enough, Myers told ReadWriteWeb that “the primary goal of using semantic technologies was to increase the visibility of its products and services”.

The How – RDFa

This increase in visibility comes through using a semantic markup language called RDFa to unambiguously describes the meaning of data on a web page – data that is important to Best Buy’s business, things like Customer data, Product Data, location data, etc.

Can you show me an example?

Yeah sure. The screenshot below from the RWW article shows a Best Buy webpage, with the RDFa tags that describe the associated data elements:

Hmm, that’s pretty cool. So rather than just a whack of text and images on a page – from which a search engine would have to do its best to infer what the page is about – this web page actually exposes data that is marked up with semantic tags. These semantic tags unambiguously describe the meaning of the data.

But do the semantic tags do that? I mean, a “Services” tag could mean a lot of different things in different contexts, right?

Ontologies – standardized vocabularies of shared meaning

That’s where the GoodRelations standardized vocabulary comes in. It provides a standardized vocabulary for e-commerce that describes product, price, and company data on the Web.

The GoodRelations vocabulary provides a set of shared Terms that define common concepts in retail/e-commerce such as product, price, etc. This vocabulary is used by both vendors in their web pages, and search engines, to provide searchers on the web with results that are most relevant to their queries.

That’s pretty cool.

In Summary …

That’s it. A pretty simple concept really. Just wanted to describe it in simple terms, so that I could refer back to this post when introducing colleagues to RDFa.

glenn

What is RDFa? – Mark Birbeck

In a previous post, I referenced an excellent talk that Mark Birbeck gave at Google in 2009, as well as a couple excellent introductory articles he wrote on RDFa.

I was re-viewing Birbeck’s Google TechTalk on RDFa, and really liked his brief explanation about what RDFa actually is. So thought I’d quote Birbeck from his talk:

I’m using RDFa as a bit of a shorthand, because I’m saying really “embedded metadata”. I’m saying any way of actually putting information into the HTML page, rather than the traditional semantic web approach of having a “separate channel”. By separate channel, I’m saying you might have had an RDF-XML document, or even an RSS feed you could regard as a kind of semantic channel of information. But a channel of information that’s kind of distinct from the web page.

Whereas what we’ve done with RDFa, and what the people behind Microformats were doing, basically the same goal, was actually make the HTML page the carrier of the metadata. And some times it’s carrying metadata about other things, and sometimes it’s carrying metadata about itself. So really, when I say RDFa (throughout this talk) I’m generally meaning those kind of solutions that allow you to embed metadata.

The reason I’m favoring RDFa is because it’s very specific goal was to align itself with RDF, so it’s actually much more precise than Microformats, but the idea is the same that you embed information [in the HTML page].

So that’s the purpose of RDFa according to Birbeck. As far as what RDFA actually is:

As for what it is, it’s a W3C standard now. It’s something we’ve been working on for four or so years – which I guess is quick for the W3C, we’ve been working on it for quite a long time, and it recently became a standard.

And it’s very much about defining the syntax of how you embed information. It’s not really about saying what the vocabularies should be. Whereas Microformats is very much more about the vocabularies.

And a good example of the flexibility of what that brings is when Google did its Rich Snippets, it just came out with its own vocabulary. It got a lot of stick for it from the Semantic Web community, or some there. But the point is that you were able to just come out with your own vocabulary, because RDFa is about the syntax and the structure, rather than the actual terms.

So it’s very much in the spirit of the Web in the sense that it allows people to define their own vocabularies or reuse existing vocabularies, and put them into their documents however they see fit.

So RDFa is a standard, and its goal is embedding metadata in pages.

That’s a very nice exaplanation I must say. Please view the entirety of Birbeck’s talk for deeper insight into the mechanics of RDFa.

glenn

Excellent non-technical intro to the Semantic Web

Just came across a couple really great non-technical video introductions to the Semantic web; perfect for folks who are new to this next-generation of the Web.

Here’s the first video – an Intro to the Semantic Web:

… and here’s a slightly more technical video on RDFa, a core semantic markup language for HTML pages:

A very effective visual learning style.

glenn

Drupal and the Semantic Web

Just beginning to explore where various Content Managment Systems are at with respect to their vision for the Semantic Web.

I find it interesting that Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead of Drupal, stressed the importance of the Semantic Web, and RDF, graph-based data representations, in his State of Drupal keynote in Boston in 2008.

Of particular interest, is his emphasis on treat database fields as first-class citizens, as the slide below emphasizes:

And, of course, Buytaert’s prescient support of RDF in the core of the Drupal platform:

And, of course, the punchline for a Web of Data:

Since this talk in the Spring of 2008, a continued focus on Semantic Web technologies from Drupal. See the following:

• Drupal, the semantic web and search

– October 2008

• RDFa and Drupal

– March 16 2009

• Structured data is the new search engine optimization

– May 2009

BTW, here’s a nice video that was presented at DrupalCon DC 2009 titled RDFa in Drupal – examples and use cases.

Think it might be time to look more closely at Drupal.

glenn

Introduction to RDFa – semantic markup for HTML pages

A very nice introduction to RDFa semantic markup for HTML pages by Mark Birbeck. This presentation is from a Google talk Mark gave in June 2009.

[Warning: This talk is definitely for a technically-inclined audience. But if you are technically-inclined, and want to learn about the RDFa approach to semantically marking up HTML web pages, this is a great video.]

The code samples can be more clearly seen in the accompanying slide presentation.

BTW, here is the official W3C RDFa Spec that explains the nuts and bolts of the RDFa syntax. And a nice series of articles by Mark Birbeck explaining RDFa can be found here and here.

glenn