RDFa » Usage

2012: The Year of the Semantic Web

Steven Pemberton — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:05:04 +0000

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”

Read the article.

ODF 1.2 Approved as Standard: Now with RDFa!

Steven Pemberton — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:57:55 +0000

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.

RDFa: The Inside Story from Best Buy

Steven Pemberton — Tue, 24 May 2011 08:47:20 +0000

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.”

The interview

Radify – RDFa Annotation Tool

Manu Sporny — Sun, 01 May 2011 21:00:51 +0000

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.

RDFa Experiences Explosive Growth

Manu Sporny — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:39:00 +0000

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.

Drupal 7 released with native RDFa support!

Steven Pemberton — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:53:04 +0000

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.

More details here.

Drupal 7 Beta 1 Featuring RDFa Released

Steven Pemberton — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 09:25:13 +0000

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.

Overstock.com adds RDFa to nearly one million pages

Steven Pemberton — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:53:14 +0000

Recently major online retailer Overstock.com added RDFa to their website, marking up the nearly one million products they sell. An example:
a book.

Newsweek using RDFa

Steven Pemberton — Thu, 27 May 2010 11:45:45 +0000

Another big user! Newsweek is now using RDFa: their homepage is just full of RDFa, as are the articles they link to.

Facebook adopts RDFa

Steven Pemberton — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:40:57 +0000

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.