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.
[...] RDFa is a simple way to add structure to your web pages, for example the text ‘ben adida’ is not just any text, it’s my name, the link to the Creative Commons page is not just any link, it’s the copyright license for my page. I’ve been working on this specification for a few years now with a team of fantastic folks (Mark Birbeck, Michael Hausenblas, Shane McCarron, Steven Pemberton, Manu Sporny, Ralph Swick, and Elias Torres. Today, Google announced support for RDFa. [...]
12 May 2009 at 19:27
[...] http://rdfa.info/2009/05/12/google-announces-support-for-rdfa/ … good decision! [...]
12 May 2009 at 19:39
Quote:
<div xmlns:v=”http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org” typeof=”v:review”>
So, the URI of this type is http://rdf.data-vocabulary.orgreview? That’s not a valid TLD. The other triples in the RDFa example have this problem as well.
~Laurens
12 May 2009 at 23:34
Laurens: you’re right, there’s a bug in the example, we’ve already sent the feedback to Google, and please send any further feedback on the RDFa mailing list.
12 May 2009 at 23:45
Yeah, I agree that if the basic framework is in place, it can be fixed relatively easily. As can be added support for e.g. FOAF types (such as foaf:Person).
12 May 2009 at 23:56
[...] tam tam in Rete, per farsi un’idea: -> Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa -> Google announces support for RDFa -> Ian Davis: Google’s RDFa a Damp Squib -> Ebiquity research group UMBC: Google support RDFa and [...]
13 May 2009 at 10:08
[...] Google have announced support for RDFa and guess what – this is planned for Drupal 7 already (next latest version). I think some of it have already made it into Drupal 7 core. [...]
13 May 2009 at 16:33
[...] Ben Adida points to further information about Google’s step towards RDFa: http://rdfa.info/2009/05/12/google-announces-support-for-rdfa/ [...]
13 May 2009 at 20:49
[...] « Google announces support for RDFa [...]
14 May 2009 at 18:13
[...] which they call rich snippets. And the support of both formats is interesting I believe the support for RDFa may be of somewhat more significance. To be clear I really think this is the “beginning” of a [...]
14 May 2009 at 19:16
[...] surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly [...]
18 May 2009 at 16:11
[...] news are good for three [...]
19 Oct 2009 at 14:52
[...] If webmasters provide structured data by marking up their sites (with microformats, RDFa, or XML feeds, for example), engines can recognize them as homepages, review sites, bookmarking [...]
7 Dec 2009 at 17:21
[...] the search term ‘Chanda’s Secrets’ in a standard lookup query. But recently Google added RDFa support and Yahoo! have been doing it for over a year, and both sites now have specific applications for [...]
11 Jan 2010 at 23:58