The UK supermarket chain Tesco, which is the UK’s largest non-food retailer, has adopted RDFa. As an example, see this product page.
It looks like the O’Reilly product catalog uses RDFa. Check out this Nikon D5000 Manual. Looks like the GoodRelations schema, and quite a bit of data. We’ve long suspected that, once big consumers of web content started looking for certain RDFa vocabularies (i.e. Google and GoodRelations), there would be an uptick in RDFa production. Looks like this is indeed happening.
“In his talk at the Search Engine Strategies 2009 conference in Chicago, Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, Co., Inc., reported very surprising effects of adding GoodRelations and RDFa to their products pages:
- GoodRelations + RDFa improved the rank of the respective pages in Google tremendously …
- 30 % percent (!) increase in traffic …
- Yahoo observes a 15% increase in the Click-through-Rate …”
According to Information week, the White House is planning to make increasing use of RDFa. “We have a lot of primary source content and have it exposed in ways that traditionally hasn’t been done by government,” Cole said. “Instead of just having PDFs that are scanned, we’re trying to reverse that trend.”
More here: Obama Team Challenges Web Developers
Check out the PLoS Journals, like PLoS Medicine or PLoS Genetics, and you’ll find RDFa for all bibliographic information, including authors, categories, etc.
Yahoo’s SearchMonkey work continues with some serious updates. We note in particular that, if you have a product to sell, the only way to mark it up is with RDFa. When you need fine-grained, dense structured data, it looks like RDFa is the clear choice.
Common Tag is an open tagging format defined using RDFa that makes content more discoverable. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs.
The companies involved in the development of Common Tag are AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag.
More information on the Common Tag Website.
Do you write HTML? You’ve just heard that Google now supports RDFa and you want to know where to start? Our own Steven Pemberton just published a fantastic RDFa introduction for HTML authors:
RDFa is a thin layer of markup you can add to your web pages that makes them understandable for machines as well as people. You could describe it as a CSS for meaning. By adding it, browsers, search engines, and other software can understand more about the pages, and in so doing offer more services or better results for the user. For instance, if a browser knows that a page is about an event such as a conference, it can offer to add it to your calendar, show it on a map, locate hotels or flights, or any number of other things.
Google just announced support for RDFa, starting with product reviews. Here’s Google’s FAQ on adding RDFa to your pages. This is a significant new direction for Google, where they will start looking at explicit data structure and provide enhanced search results accordingly. It’s fantastic to see them using RDFa for this task. It’s also fantastic to see them encouraging the use of a non-Google-branded vocabulary: open-vocabulary.org. Generic, reusable vocabularies built by industry groups, that’s exactly what we were hoping for with RDFa.
The side story here is that this was basically a Google-driven project from the start: they didn’t need the RDFa task force to create their vocabularies, to figure out how to mark up their pages, etc. Folks on the RDFa task force are finding out about this just now, as it happens. And we like it that way. RDFa is meant for communities of all sizes to mark up their pages, without centralized process overhead. Both Yahoo and Google’s RDFa launches were achieved without consultation with the RDFa community, and I consider that a success.
UPDATE: Google provides more details on RDFa for its rich snippets feature.
UPDATE 2: W3C blogs about the great news for structured web data.
Dan Connolly makes one of the more powerful arguments for truly web-extensible structured data in HTML, where you don’t need to ask for permission to innovate:
My view of Web architecture is shaped by episodes such as this one. While giga-scale deployment is always impressive and definitely something we should design for, small scale deployment is just as important. The Web spread, initially, not because of global phenomena such as Wikipedia and Facebook but because you didn’t need your manager’s permission to try it out; you didn’t even need a domain name; you could just run it on your LAN or even on just one machine with no server at all.
