In the Huffington Post, Steve Hamby, the Chief Technology Officer of Orbis Technologies, Inc. writes an evaluation of why he thinks 2012 will be the year of the Semantic Web. He includes a report of the use of RDFa and says “Was the strategy successful? … I would say yes”
The new version of the Open Document Format, ODF 1.2, has been ratified as a standard. One of the changes to ODF 1.2 is the adoption of RDFa as a way of including metadata. Read more at the ODF technical committee chair’s blog.
Earlier we reported on Best Buy’s successes as a result of using RDFa.
Search New Central has now published an interview with Jay Myers, Lead Development Engineer for Best Buy, on the whys and wherefores of implementing RDFa on their site.
“We really didn’t go into it with any expectations. We just wanted to see if it was something we might want to do. That’s why we were caught by surprise by the results… we weren’t really expecting any.”
“Within just a couple of months, we began to see an increase in our organic search results. Before long, it had increased by 30% over historical rates. We also saw an increase in our click-through rate.”
“I found that RDFa was a much more stable concept – based on the use of long established vocabularies (also known as ontologies) that have existed for years.”
Duncan Grant has created a new tool called Radify as a part of his university studies. It is a bookmarklet for the purposes of annotating a web page with RDFa. The bookmarklet features a triple viewer, edit mode and ability to load/parse new ontologies. You can read more about Duncan and his research on the Radify website.
The RDFa Working Group has published two Second Last Call Working Drafts today – RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1.
The first Last Call period for RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1 was started in late October 2010 and extended two times at the request of reviewers and comment submitters in order to get as wide a review as possible. There was input from members of the WHAT Working Group, the HTML Working Group, long-time RDFa Community participants, people working on behalf of large national governments, large and small commercial implementers, and RDFa Processor implementers.
Due to the quality of comments, the RDFa Working Group re-worked various specifications and tightened up features and language that could have caused implementations to diverge. Specifically, work to clarify the error reporting mechanism, generic XML+RDFa processing rules, the initial subject of a document, the further deprecation of xmlns:, and a Processor Graph vocabulary were completed.
The group is asking for comments on these two documents from the public until April 21st 2011. The Candidate Recommendation phase is next, during which the newly updated RDFa Test Suite will be used to test RDFa 1.1 implementations. Once there are two or more interoperable implementations, the RDFa specifications will proceed on toward the final W3C Recommended Specification.
New research released by Yahoo! shows that RDFa demonstrated explosive growth in 2010. In fact, RDFa is the fastest growing data markup format on the Web, and is used on more than 430 million web pages. It accounts for roughly 3.6% of the all of the Web pages on the Internet. How much did RDFa grow last year? 510% – you can bet that this year will show even stronger growth as people start to realize the search engine advantage that RDFa gives web content publishers.
You can learn more about this cutting edge research by Peter Mika at Yahoo! on his personal blog.
This happened some time ago, but we forgot to mention it. Flickr expresses information about images and the licenses associated with those images using RDFa. In fact, Flickr was one of the first services to adopt RDFa and use it to express metadata about the contents of the web page.
Since so many sites use Drupal as their content management system (including the Whitehouse, the BBC, Ubuntu, CNN, NATO and Amnesty International, and, well, so many others) we can expect to see RDFa appearing on many new sites in the near future.
The long-awaited Drupal 7 is on its way. Beta 1 has just been announced.
Dries Buytaert discussed integrating RDFa into Drupal in Drupal, the semantic web and search, and shortly after that a a roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7 was published. Since so many sites use Drupal as their content management system (including the Whitehouse, the BBC, Ubuntu, CNN, NATO and Amnesty International, and, well, so many others) we can expect to see RDFa appearing on many new sites in the near future.
Recently major online retailer Overstock.com added RDFa to their website, marking up the nearly one million products they sell. An example:
a book.
