Oxford SEO Studies Blog

RDFa

The dueling duality between those proponents of information derived from social networking (in so-called RealTime) and those endorsing the more consistent relevance of machine-read Natural Language Processes as to which is more entitled to the wear the mantle of Web 3.0, is suddenly allot less important.  The Semantic level allows content to be recognised by it’s context, but time is also another context,  so a more useful definition for Web 3.0 might be:

Web 3.0: the location-aware and moment-sensitive Internet.

It’s a reach across the aisle from the Semantic camp to the social butterflies, but not only is this more accurate a definition of the shift in Web orientation and technologies, it’s the one that techies and non-techies (not to mention people and machines), will quickly come to understand without having to  reach for their Wikipedia drop down menu.  For those still finding it difficult to digest the idea of an intelligent, semantic based web, Scientific American features The Semantic Web in Action which provides  a handy over view of the origins and consequences of what we’ve come to consider the biggest web innovation since the Tim Berner-Lee invented html.

The ultimate proof of the quantum arc that Semantic  search brings to the architecture of web-based data is of course, in its adoption.  Obama’s White House has  so far proven to be nothing but innovation, dragging the vestiges of a technologically challenged Bush White House kicking and screaming into the 21st century.  His administrations’ unprecedented harnessing of the net to fight and win his campaign from the primaries to the White House is well known.  But his administration’s revamping of the official White House website is less in the press.  So we took a look and lo and behold, we found his webmeisters already grappling with the state of the art in web development by embedding RDFa  schema into the html.  This is of course, the corner stone of Semantic development as the RDFa resources are the agreed mark up for adding the additional layer of meta format data; which adds the dimension of cross referenced and corroborated relevance that distinguishes Semantic  Search from standard search.  

All the extra property, rel and xmlns attributes are used by RDFa to add the semantic structure layer to the document. Below, it  better describes the licensing for the document. This information can be used by APIs to auto-detect content licensing and determine, without human intervention, that the content is safe to use.

And this is the RDFa that determines the licensing parameters of the html document: l

 Of course there are those who will interpret what is good enough for Obama is good enough for them, but the real news is that adding an RDFa layer of meta data to your web content so that your content is more accessible, searchable, malleable and machine (as well as human), readable is quickly becoming a requirement rather than a theoretical preference.

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