The timing couldn't be better for the release of Semantify, a new service from Israel/San Francisco's Dapper.net. One week after Yahoo! announced that it will begin indexing the semantic markup and meaning of content on the web, Semantify offers a remarkably simple way to get your website marked up semantically. Automatically, forever.
Once you learn how to use Dapper's basic interface, it can take less than five minutes to set up the Semantify service. Hello SEO, 3.0.
Here's what it takes:
1. Identify your website and show Dapper a few different pages on it.
2. Point and click to identify particular fields on your pages, like the titles, dates and authors of articles. Sometimes this requires a few extra clicks to exclude false positives in the previewed results.
3. Name those fields according to any number of Semantic Web naming protocols. In my test of Semantify, for my personal site marshallk.com, I used the Dublin Core namespaces "title," "date," description" and "creator" to name my fields in Dapper. I could have designated fields as the names of my friends or as particular locations. There are simple descriptions of other namespace conventions linked to from the Semantify page and this part is pretty intuitive.
4. Once you've gotten this far, in the standard method of using Dapper you'd grab an RSS feed that would deliver changes that get made to the fields you're monitoring. With Semantify, though, you get a few lines of PHP code to paste into the header of your website. See the screenshot at the bottom of this post.
And then you're done.
Dapper GUI + Semantic Web vocab list + PHP embed code = automated Semantic Web markup for your site. It's like a point and click sitemap creator on the element-by-element level. It's a perpetual standards-based SEO machine. That's the incentive for publishers. For the rest of us, once the meaning of content is machine readable - there's a world of sophisticated information processing we'll be able to automate and leverage.
It's as simple as that, or at least it will be once all the little kinks are worked out. At launch the embed code is only available in PHP but the company says more options are right around the corner. The company rushed to get this service out the door and that's a little obvious right now. It's also clear that the problems are small ones that they'll be able to solve quickly. There's more sophisticated options coming (more granular control over namespaces, for example) and the user interface could always be improved over there. None the less, this service could end up being very, very big.
You can go through those steps above today, I have, and whenever the Yahoo! spider hits your webpage, it will be shown a semantically marked up version of whatever content is live on your pages at the time. It will come from your domain and everyone will be happy. Wash, rinse and repeat for all your domains. Then, thank Dapper for making it so damn easy.
Many people have questioned the viability of the Semantic Web vision, asking who will do the markup. Yahoo! has stepped in and provided the incentive for every publisher to do so, now Dapper's Semantify is hoping to provide the service that will make it easy, too.
Once it's just a matter of course for publishers to publish semantic markup with their content, look out world. My favorite example, from our coverage of the Yahoo! announcement, is this: show me all the movie reviews written by a user's friends who live in Europe. Today, that would be hard to do. Once semantic markup is widely published and indexed - then such queries will be trivial and the only question will be what we want to do with that information.
The Semantic Web could change the world. The only things missing are incentive like Yahoo! now provides and ease-of-use, as Semantify began offering today.
Comments
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Marshall
Thanks for posting this. Dapper is definitely doing some very interesting things with their service, and Semantify is a step in the right direction. While there are still some steps to take in making the tools more user friendly, the key is that authoring tools are becoming available, and efforts like this one in conjunction with moves like the one Yahoo made, will probably lead to more Linked Data, which is what we all want (well some of us at least).
Posted by: mndoci.myopenid.comThis is a very interesting concept. I wonder if it will actually encourage site-owners to learn semantic markup, or turn into an indefinite crutch in the name of cheap SEO.
Posted by: David Frey | March 20, 2008 10:55 PMThe Dapper folks continue to impress. Great work!
I'm going to try and get them on the phone about BricaBox integration one of these days, but first, I think they should join the Ohance team.
Posted by: Nate Westheimer | March 20, 2008 11:50 PMhttp://www.ohance.org/
Sounds like an interesting service, though it feels a bit like cloaking to me, that is to send one version of the page to search engines, and another version to users. It would feel more comforting to send the semantically enriched page to everyone, not just the bots.
Posted by: impl.emented.com/Jonas
This is pretty pointless. Google dont index the semantic web any differently, and it's idiotic of Yahoo to suggest that the semantic web is somehow different from the real web or some such complete rubbish.
Semantic web, is the web. Google just use ingenuity to extract the semantic data, not make you put yet more silly tags on your content.
Posted by: Phill Midwinter | March 21, 2008 1:44 AMThis is such a great announcement with even greater timing. Yahoo is set to launch SearchMonkey in the coming weeks and there are a lot of keen site owners chomping at the bit to take advantage of it. Help set them apart from the sea of competitors.
Posted by: David Peterson | March 21, 2008 2:44 AMI wonder if semantic web will manage to convince the less net savvy that is actually not a shady technique and it just a better way of organising data. And how far it will go by telling the bots what to read.
Posted by: Bagra SEO | March 21, 2008 4:04 AMThanks for the heads-up, Marshall! Heading over there now to try this out...
Posted by: Jon | March 21, 2008 8:16 AMoh, btw, all your friends are watching "The Princess Bride".
Semantic Cloaking?
Posted by: Ben | March 21, 2008 10:51 AM@#5 .. it pays to pay attention. Google is making strides of their own towards semantics and the way the web is indexed... with regards to the social graph FOAF is a semantics project (also being supported by Yahoo...) the push for a "more" semantic web has been a long fought effort of many dedicated developers, I wouldn't be so quick to write it off as some kind of buzzword hooey (twine, yeah, buzzword hooey, but the semantic web is a very real effort with a LOT of valuable potential for everyone.)
Posted by: Matt | March 21, 2008 11:30 AMExcellent stuff, this can only help the grass-roots adoption of microformats, and once that happens Google will finally get some competition.
BeardyGeek had another good post about an easy method to get your blog ready for Yahoo!'s semantic search here:
http://www.beardygeek.com/2008/03/15/web-30-how-to-put-semantic-tags-in-your-blog/
To me, the move towards semantic markup seems a logical next step on from separating content & style. Web 3.0 won't be an obvious shift, but the drip, drip of technological increments until we realise we're there.
Posted by: andymurd | March 21, 2008 1:53 PMThis is not a good way of doing it. The W3C have put out a standard which achieves the same result as what Dapper does but without being reliant on one specific vendor. The solution is called GRDDL and it allows a page author to declare a semantic mapping from XHTML semantics and individual use patterns to RDF semantics. This works across technology platforms as it just uses HTML, XML and XSLT, not a particular back-end technology like PHP.
I wouldn't touch Semantify with a barge pole, and I will be strongly advising people who ask me about it to do likewise. It's not unfixable, but it's got some significant problems.
Still, I hope that it'll prompt people into doing it properly - with GRDDL, an open standard with open-source implementations already available.
Posted by: Tom Morris | March 21, 2008 2:02 PMTom, is there a point and click GRDDL system?
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickMarshall: No. That would be cool, for sure. It's a good idea, but Semantify is a really poor implementation for non-obvious reasons. I'll probably blog about why later.
Posted by: Tom Morris | March 21, 2008 2:54 PMIt's very difficult for people to understand the potential "Semantic web" will have on the way we interact on the web. Just as it was difficult for people to see the need for PCs, or Search Engines, or better algorithms for search engines, etc... The glazed over look people get when one speaks about Semantic web is what makes it so compelling, it's in it's infancy and full of possibilities.
Posted by: Peter T - webshop | March 21, 2008 6:06 PMThis looks very interesting particularly for sites where there is a large amount of semi--structured semantic content. I'd like to try it for example on recipe sites where ingredients, methods, timings, servings etc could be pulled out.
Posted by: Jonathan Briggs | March 22, 2008 2:37 AMphp is a bit of a hurdle, this sort of thing seems more suited to javascript or some other platform independant technology to achieve widespread adoption.
Posted by: Simon | March 24, 2008 3:44 AMIt seems to be a good tool. Yes it is not GRDDL and it may have short comings, but what systems doesn't? I appreciate and follow standards wherever possible, but I am also trying to publish a large number of pages which I want marked up. My top priority is to find an easy to use solution that works and Semantify seems to be a nice fit. I'm like most of my customers who don't care about all the nuts and bolts they just want an easy to use solution.
Posted by: TJGodel | March 25, 2008 10:16 AMEveryone interested in "semantification" may check Triplify. The approach differs from Dapper's Semantify ... Basically it doesn't add RDFa to websites and it's not configurable by a GUI but it can serve LinkedData, JSON, RDF/N3 build from data "buried" in RDBS. The goal is to create interoperable data within the Semantic Web.
Posted by: Haschek | March 26, 2008 5:43 AM"Time is ripe for every ">http://www.broadwayinfotech.com/web_promotion/web_promotion.shtml”>
Posted by: SEO | April 18, 2008 10:57 PMSEO specialists to start themselves calling as SEM (Search Engine Marketers). Search Engines have already become cauldrons where many things are getting cooked at the same time.
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