The Open Archives Initiative, which “develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content”, has just published support for RDFa.
I’ve written some thoughts on Yahoo’s SearchMonkey after having seen it live:
Yahoo recently announced SearchMonkey, and for the first time in 10 years, I have a reason to switch search engines, from Google to Yahoo (In fact, I just did that in Firefox.) Most web-savvy engineers know that online services succeed in big ways when they become platforms: when other developers can expand on the functionality in ways not foreseen by the original developers. Yahoo is the first to figure out how to do just that with a major search engine. With SearchMonkey, any developer gains the ability to provide custom ways of extracting and presenting page data within Yahoo search results.
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And the best part is that Yahoo has separated data extraction from data presentation. Specifically, a data extractor for LinkedIn can produce RDFa, and different presentation applications can use different portions of that RDFa. If the extractor for Monster.com produces the same RDFa, then the same presentation application can be used to display both Monster.com and LinkedIn data. And if LinkedIn and Monster.com produce RDFa natively, within their web sites, then there’s no need to build data extraction… the presentation application can work natively on the raw web pages.
Check out SearchMonkey.
Bryan Lawrence had some thoughts on authoring RDFa in a Wiki. I’m quite excited to see this kind of development and looking forward seeing results in form of plug-ins, extensions, etc. - anyone else out there who has a concrete implementation available?
“Fuzzbot is a native Firefox plug-in that uses librdfa for its processing back-end. It is most useful for detecting embedded semantic information in web pages and performing actions on that semantic data.”
TopBraid Composer is a modeling environment for developing Semantic Web ontologies and building semantic applications, built as a plug-in for Eclipse. In part of the description for the product, it says:
“RDFa and GRDDL are evolving W3C standards to embed semantic markup in XHTML pages. Composer can parse such documents to extract RDFa metadata from HTML pages. The metadata can then be treated like any other RDF source, and users can perform DL reasoning or SPARQL queries on it. Together with the other data integration capabilities and visualization tools Composer can be used to develop mash-up applications. TopBraid is also a comprehensive RDFa Editor.”
In the OpenOffice.org blog GullFOSS, this week’s Development at a Glance mentions that they have started work on support for RDFa and RDF XML metadata in ODF 1.2 documents. ODF, or the Open Document Format, is the document format for electronic office documents produced by the suite of programs that make up Open Office.
Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Mozilla Firefox.
It is a browser extension which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and shows an icon in the browser’s status bar when it finds any. Currently it supports RDF autodiscovery (SIOC, FOAF, DOAP and any type) and RDFa metadata detection.
The new experimental Yahoo Microsearch supports RDFa marked-up pages. For instance, searching for Ivan Herman shows his location on a map, and several predicates he uses on his home page. such as ‘formatted name’ and ‘holds account’, appear in the search results.
A couple of days ago, riese (RDFizing and Interlinking the EuroStat Data Set Effort) has been launched; it aims at serving the entire statistical data available via Eurostat (some 3 billion triple). Currently, riese is the largest known deployment of XHTML+RDFa content on the Web (some 5 million triple). In riese, several vocabularies are in use: From AtomOwl (for data updates) over DOAP (self-description of the project) to SKOS (hierarchical order of themes).
The riese Semantic Web application is a good-practice implementation of several of the Semantic Web Deployment WG, such as RDFa, SKOS, but also Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies (for riese’s schemas). Last but not least, riese is a contribution to the linked-data initiative, where the aim is to create semantic links between open datasets available on the Web.
A very interesting application of RDFa has been announced recently: Ontology Online. It is what I would call a Web 3.0 application, using the best of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web - check it out!