Another big user! Newsweek is now using RDFa: their homepage is just full of RDFa, as are the articles they link to.
Archive for the ‘Usage’ Category
Yesterday Facebook announced Opengraph:
The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.
Opengraph uses the Open Graph Protocol, which uses RDFa and “enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, [...] it enables any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.”
Initial publishers using Open Graph Protocol include IMDb, Microsoft, NHL, Posterous, Rotten Tomatoes, TIME, and Yelp.
The UK supermarket chain Tesco, which is the UK’s largest non-food retailer, has adopted RDFa. As an example, see this product page.
“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
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.
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.
Over at WebBackplane, Mark Birbeck describes how the UK’s Central Office of Information has been generating RDF vocabularies via an open-source process, and then using those vocabularies to decorate their web pages. The blog demonstrates how they are being used to mark up job vacancies, and then how that information can be reliably scraped. Read more.
Another example of using the same jobs vocabulary is at Jobsgopublic.
Manuela Gastmeyer and Joachim Neubert of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) announced:
STW Thesaurus for Economics is now available under http://zbw.eu/stw.
STW is a richly interconnected vocabulary in English and German on economics and business economics as well as some related subject areas. It includes subject categories and lots of synonyms in order to find the appropriate terms. Its publication aims at providing an interlinking hub for economics resources on the web of Linked Data.
The thesaurus is maintained by the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) and published under a Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.
It is delivered as XHTML+RDFa pages with an incremental search interface and a navigatable tree. A SKOS RDF/XML dump version can be downloaded, as well as a set of links to dbpedia concepts. More information about the design of the application can be found in a paper for the “Linked Data on the Web” workshop in Madrid.
Ben Adida points out in his posting Paris Hilton thinks RDFa is hot that MySpace has started using RDFa, and points to Paris Hilton’s page.
