RE: Semantic Web and Search Results

Hi Bobby,

<snip/>

> But what is unclear to me is - and I'll be greatly appreciated if you tell me - what is 
> required for an ordinary website to meet the semantic web's guidelines. In other words, what 
> should the webmasters do with the html-code of their site for it to correspond to the semantic > web? 

Ok, in a nutshell, you need to start to expose the data you have on a site (which is currently marked up in HTML presumably) as RDF. This may take the form of RDF/XML descriptions published alongside regular HTML pages (as is the case with e.g. [1]), or of RDF descriptions embedded within HTML pages, using a syntax such as RDFa [2] or eRDF [3][4].

Which of these approaches suits you best will depend on the context - both have their pros and cons. I tend to favour the former, but that's just my preference.

If you publish data in RDF you should also make sure you link to other RDF data on the Web. What's a Web without links, right? [5] sets out how to go about doing this, and has lots of general information about and recipes demonstrating how to publish RDF data on the Web. Appendix B [6] might be a good place to start, as it works through a simple example with reference to other parts of the document for more details.

> Another thing is, will the search engines make some tweaks in their algorithm to correspond to > the semantic web? And if yes, when do you think it will happen? 

Probably yes, and also we can expect to see (in fact are already seeing) new search engines designed specifically for the Semantic Web, e.g. [7].

HTH,

Tom.


[1] http://revyu.com/things/designing-with-web-standards-by-jeffrey-zeldman
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
[3] http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki/Main/RdfInHtml
[4] http://www.digital-web.com/articles/rdf_for_the_rest_of_us/
[5] http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
[6] http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/#yourself
[7] http://swse.deri.org/

Received on Friday, 10 August 2007 10:36:49 UTC