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Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday,
June 11, 2011 8:58 PM
Subject:
[ontolog-forum] Google, Microsoft,and Yahoo Team Up to
Advance Semantic Web
FYI. Reported
at MIT Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/37765/?mod=chfeatured.
Google,
Microsoft, and Yahoo Team Up to Advance Semantic Web
Friday,
June 10, 2011
By Tom
Simonite
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
have teamed up to encourage Web page operators to make the
meaning of their pages understandable to search engines.
The move may finally encourage
widespread use of technology that makes online information
as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans. If the
effort works, the result will be not only better search
results, but also a wave of other intelligent apps and
services able to understand online information almost as
well as we do.
The three big Web companies
launched the initiative, known as Schema.org,
last week. It defines an interconnected vocabulary of terms
that can be added to the HTML markup of a Web page to
communicate the meaning of concepts on the page. A location
referred to in text could be defined as a courthouse, which
Schema.org understands as being a specific type of
government building. People and events can also be defined,
as can attributes like distance, mass, or duration. This
data will allow search engines to better understand how
useful a page may be for a given search query—for example,
by making it clear that a page is about the headquarters of
the U.S. Department of Defense, not five-sided regular
shapes.
The move represents a major
advance in a campaign initiated in 2001 by Tim Berners-Lee,
the inventor of the Web, to enable software to access the
meaning of online content—a vision known as the "semantic
Web." Although the technology to do so exists, progress has
been slow because there have been few reasons for Web page
operators to add the extra markup.
Schema.org may change that, says Dennis
McCleod, who works on semantic Web technology at the
University of Southern California. By tagging information,
Web page owners could improve the position of their site in
search results—an important source of traffic. "This will
motivate people to actually add semantic data to their
pages," says McCleod. "It's always hard to predict what will
be adopted, but generally, unless there's something in it
for people, they won't do it. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
have given people a strong reason."
The Schema.org approach is
modeled on one of the more straightforward methods of
describing the meaning of a Web page's contents. "The
trouble with many of these techniques is, they are really
hard to use," says McCleod. "One of the encouraging things
about Schema.org is that they are pursuing this at a level
that is quite usable, so it is much easier to mark up your
website."
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