This week we've been exploring the emergence of the Semantic Web among companies like Best Buy and Google. It's all thanks to RDFa, code that is inserted into the HTML of web pages to add extra meaning. The increasing usage of RDFa was one of the main themes at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco.
There is perhaps no better example than Facebook's use of RDFa. We chatted to Facebook open standards evangelist David Recordon to find out more.
Yesterday we wrote about the increasing usage of Semantic Web technologies by large commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Best Buy. The Semantic Web is a Web of added meaning, which ultimately enables smarter and more personalized web apps to be built. In this post we explore how a leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, is using a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to add semantics to its webpages.
This is not just an academic exercise for Best Buy. As we will see, semantic technology has already led to increased traffic and better service to its customers. We spoke to Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com, to find out how.
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last week, I met up with two W3C representatives to discuss the current state of the Semantic Web - a Web of added meaning and structured data. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the official standards organization of the Web and is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I spoke with W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman and W3C eGovernment Interest Group leader Sandro Hawke.
The main takeaway from the conversation was the rapid adoption of RDFa, by big commercial companies such as Facebook and Best Buy. It's come as a "very pleasant surprise" to Ivan Herman.
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.
Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.
Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal will launch a new publishing platform. It's grandly described as a "semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it's a publishing platform that automates the production of content. What's more, the resulting web pages include no original content. It's all aggregated from other sources.
So in many ways this is reducing Web publishing to its most basic form, devoid of new content. Is this "automated content manufacturing," as founder Paul Sweeney described it to me today, useful to people?
