Search Engine Land.com:

Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.

There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?

lbjay uses both the Tabulator and Semantic Radar Firefox plugins to do magic with RDF in his browser.

A member of the Web4lib mail list asked:

How do I create a semantic web site?

I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we move away from mark up languages altogether?

Am I right in thinking that OWL and RDF do not contain any information on how the document is to be displayed or presented? They do not seem to allow for style sheets.

Is the creation of a semantic web site completely different from anything that has gone before and I am stuck in an old way of looking at the problem? Are mark up languages a thing of the past as far as the Web is concerned?

Any clarification would be much appreciated.

RDF is certainly among the acronyms most identified with Semantic Web, but it’s not necessarily as complex as all that, and there are things we can do today to answer the question. Among the best of them (and one that will always deliver value), is to make sure our sites are marked up meaningfully. I know this sounds simple, but it’s surprising how few data-rich library sites take advantage of it.

Example: if you want all the titles of works on a page to be bold, don’t use the <b> tag, instead, use a semantic class name like <class = “title”> and use CSS to make it look like you want. Otherwise, our pages are just a jumble of bold and non-bolded stuff (think how much easier printed citations would be to parse if they were marked up that way).

The costs and benefits of semantic markup are frequently argued on a number of lists, but it’s worth noting that we no longer substitute ‘i’ for ‘1′ or ‘O’ for ‘0′ on our keyboards. Binary just doesn’t work as well with i and o.

It’s also worth looking into Microformats, a way of encoding semantic details into the data we use every day, using the tools we already have. Tantek explains them in a recent presentation.

One huge difference between the Microformats crowd and semantic webbers is the issue of human usability. That is, Microformats are built for humans first, machines second, in part because we just don’t have good and well distributed tools to use data that’s not formatted for human use, but also because it helps clear up errors and prevent gaming.

Tantek speaks of Microformats as a cornerstone of the “lower case semantic web” in this presentation from 2004, and ReadWriteWeb directly compares the two.

I’ve been working on some of these challenges myself, and have worked hard to make content presented in Scriblio semantically clear. Take a look at some of the markup in this example. All the bibliographic data is represented inside an unordered list and is parsable as XML. Here’s an excerpt of the ISBNs:

<li class="isbn"><h3 id="12023_isbn_1" >ISBN</h3>
	<ul>
		<li>1586421158</li>
		<li>9781586421151</li>
	</ul>
</li>

That’s not to say the Semantic Web folks don’t see a difference. This article at Semantic Focus says they miss the point, but I side with Clay Shirky’s Praise for Evolvable Systems. Speaking on how the HTTP and HTML finally delivered on the promise of hyperlinks envisioned decades earlier, he notes:

Centrally designed protocols start out strong and improve logarithmically. Evolvable protocols start out weak and improve exponentially. It’s dinosaurs vs. mammals, and the mammals win every time. The Web is not the perfect hypertext protocol, just the best one that’s also currently practical. Infrastructure built on evolvable protocols will always be partially incomplete, partially wrong and ultimately better designed than its competition.

Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.

Text is unilinear…when written on paper.

Digital text is different.

Hypertext can link.

With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web.

Who will organize all of this data? We will. You will.

Digital text is not longer just linking information…Web 2.0 is linking people…people sharing, trading, and collaborating.

We’ll need to rethink a few things…

Thanks to the Google Operating System blog for bringing this to my attention.

Michael Wesh, cultural anthropology, digital ethnography, kansas state university, video, visual explanation, web 2.0, future of the web, wisdom of crowds, semantic web

Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin).

What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory:

When writing markup against deadlines and priorities, it’s easy to forget that somebody else will eventually have to maintain it. Conveniently, some of the central ideas behind microformats revolve around the fact that they are designed for humans first and created with simplicity in mind. This means you’ll have markup that is easy to understand and maintain for everyone, including:

• The engineer integrating your code next week
• You updating your code next month
• The new guy taking over your job when you get promoted next year

Basically, microformats suggest the use of common class names for various XHTML elements. As it turns out, the hCard microformat is a convenient way of representing the data from vCards in XHTML. The convenience is by design, of course. Here’s an example:

<div class=“vcard”>
<a class=“url fn” href=“http://maisonbisson.com/”>Casey Bisson</a>
<div class=“org”>MaisonBisson</div>
</div>

By standardizing the class names for this content, it’s easier to share and maintain stylesheets, re-use content, and read the content programatically. Perhaps most importantly, it offers valuable tips to search engines crawling your site about what the data is, making it more findable.

The principles of microformats are such:

• solve a specific problem
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

The potential here for libraries is huge, but we should take seriously the caution that microformats be easy to use and the design rule that it be simple.

microformat, networked information, semantic web, microformats, library, libraries, metadata, data standards

A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.

To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:

<META name=“ICBM” content=“42.93564,-72.27239”>
<META name=“DC.title” content=“Jon Udell”>

I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.

Update: Bjørn is right, GeoURL is back and I should have updated this post ages ago. Look here for more about geolocation on MaisonBisson. …And Bjørn’s website is worth a look too.

Technorati Tags: geographic, geolocation, gis, map, metadata, semantic web