Re: fw: Google starts supporting RDFa -- 'rich snippets'

Bernard Vatant wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Agreed with Dan and all others saying we have to welcome Google's 
> move. But nevertheless, I take the risk to include myself in the 1000 
> defined below ... :-)
> I suppose pages such as [1] with indications for webmasters are likely 
> to be more read by webmasters than RDFa specs themselves or linked 
> data best pratcices documents. So, is this page making correctly the 
> case for linked data? For structured semantic data, yes, and nevermind 
> the vocabulary.
> But for linked data, well, not much. Linked data ate about 
> relationships, and unfortunately the only example given in this page 
> defining a relation between resources using "about" is "for the 
> structured data geeks out there" ... and can be misleading for people 
> not aware of what LOD is about.
>
> <div xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/" typeof="v:Person">
>   <span property="v:name">John Smith</span>
>   <span rel="v:affiliation">
>      <span about="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Corporation" 
> property="v:name">ACME</span>
>   </span>
>   ...
> </div>
>
> So John Smith is affiliated to a wikipedia page. Whoever has the ear 
> of Google folks behind this could simply suggest to replace in this 
> example "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Corporation"  by 
> "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Acme_Corporation", explaining quickly the 
> difference.
> Of course one can wonder if a fictional guy is better off being 
> affiliated with a fictional corporation than with a real web page.
>
> That said, to follow-up with Dan's suggestion, would it be really 
> difficult e.g., for LOD html pages such as 
> http://dbpedia.org/page/Acme_Corporation to be RDFa-ized?
>
> Bernard
Bernard,

Google will engage the Linked Data realm based on the natural effects of 
the Web. Note, they crawl DBpedia like crazy (since inception). Also 
remember, R. Guha has been with Google for eons, he is one of the 
original creators of what we know today as RDF.

The hidden story here ultimately comes down to: what's making Google 
decided to unveil what's been hidden behind their curtains for a while? 
My guess: Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo! Search Monkey. Businesses don't like 
opportunity costs, and they absolutely don't twiddle thumbs once it 
becomes palpable :-)

Others: As I state repeatedly: History is a great teacher. History can 
endow you with immense clarity (technically and/or commercially).



Kingsley
>
>
> [1] http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146646
>> On 13/5/09 15:23, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>>
>>> I desperately hope that you can see the Google is providing a huge
>>> opportunity to showcase Linked Data meme value. Again, so what -- if
>>> they don't use existing vocabularies? What matters is that they are
>>> using RDFa to produce structured data, and that is simply huge!!!
>>
>> Yeah, to be blunt, the last thing this situation needs right now is 
>> having 1000 semantic web pedants descend, complaining that they're 
>> not doing x, y or z right, that they don't "get it", that they're 
>> copycatting yahoo, or whatever. This won't help anyone and would be 
>> severely counterproductive.
>>
>> What would help right now is having real and sizable sites expose 
>> lots of RDFa HTML pages using FOAF, DOAP, SIOC, SKOS, CC etc. If 
>> anyone has such information and is exposing it only in RDF/XML and 
>> not RDFa, I'd suggest looking to make that change...
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>
>


-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Wednesday, 13 May 2009 19:08:12 UTC