Wine, Film and Books: Adaptive Blue Offers Open Format to Make the Web Smarter
Semantic web company Adaptive Blue has published what it hopes will become a standard for publishers who want to signal in their header tags when a webpage is primarily about a particular book, film, wine or other type of objects. From search to trend analysis to a richer browsing experience - the developments that could come from adoption such a standard are many.
Called AB Meta, the format was developed in concert with a number of other web companies and is aimed to be part of a larger effort to pick up where existing Semantic Web and microformats markup leaves off. It's simple and extensible.
When the meaning of web pages becomes machine readable - magical things can happen.
Bloggers who want to mark up particular pages or post pages with AB Meta can do so using Dougal Campbell's HeadMeta WordPress plugin. Some post-level meta data editing is possible with Typepad but Blogger users are out of luck. Hopefully someone will build a UI for self-publishers.
For commercial publishers and retail sites, the AB Meta standard should be much easier to implement across their sites. In addition to the new spec drawn up to describe objects, AB Meta also leverages existing Dublin Core markup when available.
Above is a sample of some simple AB Meta, below is an extended version.
AM Meta is based largely on Adaptive Blue's work developing its BlueOrganizer smart browser plug-in and SmartLinks contextual reference tool. Now that the company has come up with a robust, simple and extensible format for designating the primary object of a web page and describing its various characteristics - the next logical step is to open that format up and do some biz dev building adoption in web pages themselves. Though anyone will be able to index AB Meta, Adaptive Blue's products will presumably be the most advanced at first in what it can do with the markup of its own creation.
We're big fans of the semantic web here at RWW and (disclosure) Adaptive Blue CEO Alex Iskold writes some of the smartest posts about it that you'll find here or anywhere.
Comments
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they couldn't accomplish something similar using microformats? adding this type of info in meta tags seems redundant since its already contained in the content.
Posted by: chris | April 21, 2008 10:12 PM
Isn't Machine Tags roughly similar? Flickr does a good job with it. (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fgroups%2Fapi%2Fdiscuss%2F72157594497877875%2F&ei=UqYNSKf-HYqEswLO3_iQDA&usg=AFQjCNEHj9AktwCVSxQGE2TJulv1fi67IQ&sig2=EpRE5zIbxWHqUE6rKIG3uw)
Posted by: Jax | April 22, 2008 1:50 AM
@chris AB Meta is meant to be simple and headers are simpler to grasp for most bloggers and publishers. also, there are plugins for Wordpress for example, that allow people to do this easily. And finally, there is nothing in the spec that precludes extending it into the page via microformats.
@Jax: Yep, similar idea meant for things other than geo.
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 22, 2008 5:46 AM
what is semantical about it, really?
Posted by: Yakov | April 22, 2008 9:39 AM
@Yakov
Well, its about basic semantics of simple things like books music, movies, etc. - a declaration that a page is about a thing.
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 22, 2008 1:31 PM
Hmm, this format doesn't seem fully thought out. It says to enter "artist" or "director" fields, with no explanation for the formatting specifics of these fields.
First name only? Both names? Middle initial? Specifics are important folks! Otherwise it's just data labeling, not semantics.
Posted by: Bill | April 22, 2008 2:28 PM
@Bill
Yes specifics are important, but more important is to have something simple. Instead of focusing on what constitutes a valid name, like giving a regular expression for it, we focus on the fact that movies have directors and music albums have artists associated with them.
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 22, 2008 4:42 PM
Sure associations are great, but why make all the same mistakes people made when defining the RSS spec? Parsers now deal with over 20 date formats because of oversights related to not defining things like "what a date should look like".
Not defining "best practices" or "preferred formats" for things like names is just going to make things even more of a mess.
Posted by: Bill | April 23, 2008 10:33 AM
Though this is an important area for establishing metadata formats and practices, it is unfortunate that again a standard is trying to emerge as a de facto vendor-driven one, without regard to widely accepted community and industry recommended specifications.
IMHO, more would be served by AB Meta in a shorter time frame if it also supported an RDF or RDFa mapping. The activity around Semantic Web specifications has been growing exponentially, and to miss out on this simply allows another subsequent contender to derail any gains made here.
Posted by: eric neumann | April 23, 2008 11:32 AM
One page can contain only one subject (one book)? Creating more meta data about the page content is the wrong way to go. For example, the description of the book will probably also appear in the page itself, so now we have double entry of data, and one of them will be wrong. You need to use the existing data and create from it the meta data by labeling it.
Posted by: Raanan Avidor | April 23, 2008 3:07 PM
@Raanan
One page can contain multiple objects, but this format is for pages that are focused on 1 thing - a book, a stock, a movie, etc. There are ton of pages like this around the web.
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 27, 2008 4:01 PM