Comments on: Semantic Web or: why Yahoo! resisted Microsoft’s takeover

By: SitePoint Blogs » Figure out how the monkey ticks and win $10,000

SitePoint Blogs » Figure out how the monkey ticks and win $10,000 — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:23:41 +0000

[...] have previously blogged about the new Yahoo! search platform called SearchMonkey. It is a major step in the right direction. It [...]

By: Will the ’semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML? — Tyssen Design

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:07:12 +0000

[...] Peterson, on his blog at Sitepoint, has had quite a bit to say about the issue and one of the points he makes is that, if you haven’t already, there are two [...]

By: web(cslai) » Blog Archive » Semantic Network

web(cslai) » Blog Archive » Semantic Network — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:32:37 +0000

[...] Web” becomes extremely popular that Sitepoint blogs keep posting articles on this topic (1, 2). In my college days, I learned about Semantic Network and I wonder if there is some relationship [...]

By: Mark Harbottle

Mark Harbottle — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:06:38 +0000

Great post David. I think when it comes to leveraging their own content Yahoo obviously has an advantage, and they own a lot of it as you say so they’re going to be first out of the gate. However looking further out once the publishing model for metadata is widely adopted Google will have the upper hand. Google have proven to be the masters of “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” after all. Time will tell.

By: Mark Birbeck

Mark Birbeck — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:11:18 +0000

Hi David,

In my view, you can’t hope for a viable semantic web without being able to publish metadata as easily as you can publish a blog, and although it’s taken too many years to get there, with RDFa and Microformats we are finally there.

But you also can’t hope for a viable semantic web until you can search for that metadata. Unfortunately, without RDFa and Microformats you’re left Indexing RDF/XML files which the the Googles and Yahoos were never likely to do, as long as the return was so difficult to see. It’s also difficult to see someone else doing it in a viable way, as long as the amount of content in those RDF/XML files remains a sub-set of the web universe.

However, put these two together, and you have an exciting proposition. Indexing HTML files is what the search engines are good at, because that’s their job. So to dig out any metadata they find is not such a big step for them.

And more than that, since the publishing model for metadata is increasingly going to be the same as for publishing any other web page, there will be a lot more data available for the search engines to index, making it a lot more worthwhile to do the indexing.

As you say…isn’t it great when a plan comes together. ;)

Regards,

Mark