One small step for Yahoo, one giant leap for embedded metadata

By David Peterson | February 22, 2008 | Web Tech

The Semantic Web means a lot of different things to a small group of people and it means pretty much nothing to a larger group of people.

Yahoo is working hard to change that. It is no secret that Yahoo is a very forward thinking company, they have a lot of great web systems and are a major early adopter of technologies like microformats – used on sites like flickr. That embedded metadata is a gold mine just waiting to be tapped into.

Firefox 3 will ship with built in functionality to display this embedded metadata. Since Firefox 3 is not officially out yet, Firefox 2 users can start exploring what is out there with the Operator plugin. It gives a visual indicator of hidden metadata and give you ways of doing interesting things with it:

Geo locate an address on Google Maps
Add web contact addresses to your local address book
Add events from Upcoming to your calendar
Heaps more…

So, how does this relate to the Semantic Web and how is Yahoo set to give it a boost? Peter Mika of Yahoo Research Spain has just released Microsearch, a search engine that:

…instead of hiding metadata, brings it to the front, thereby showing the user just how much metadata is out there for any given query.

And because this hidden metadata is structured data, you can do amazingly useful things with it like overlaying pages on a visual timeline or automatically mapping pages and entries onto a map.

Yahoo microsearch example web interface

Microsearch currently extracts and does useful things with the following metadata formats:

microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview)
linked RDF – via the HTML
RDFa – set to become a W3C Recommendation soon (I will blog about this shortly)

This is an important step, a major web company is acknowledging the benefit of semantic markup. Soon it will become a necessity for web sites to embed this extra metadata into pages so that they can be mashed up on the fly by anyone, even my Mum and Dad :)

Written By:

David Peterson

David Peterson has been a web developer since the early years - 1995. He works in the steamy tropics and cranks out high performance Drupal sites that integrate with the OpenData Web. His wonderful family, making lovely photographs and searching for the perfect espresso keeps him happy.

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{ 6 comments }

david.seth.p February 24, 2008 at 12:19 am: Thanks John for the update, do you know when it has been pushed off to?
John Allsopp February 23, 2008 at 9:57 am: Recently it was announced that Firefox 3 won’t have microformats discovery built into the UI – but this is still planned for later versions.
john
locomotivate February 22, 2008 at 1:52 pm: Fantastic.
I enjoy embedding microformats wherever I can in the sites I develop. I know no-one really cares (except for me – yet) but it’s things like this that I’m sure will make my clients and their user’s appreciative of hidden things that are revealed as time goes on.
On another side, searching for “avoca boardriders” (a local surfing group that I am a part of and run the website for) reveals my address on a map with my name.
I don’t know how I really feel about that! Atleast it’s the po box.
Sarang February 22, 2008 at 1:28 pm: Google Experimental has timeline and map views. Personally, I prefer web-of-data as opposed to web-of-docs, based on w3 standards.
Jambo February 22, 2008 at 11:15 am: Since Flickr started using microformats, I have seen their page rankings in Google fall. Additionally, Flickr forces each photo page to have the same keyword and decription meta tag. These tags describe the page in terms of the Flickr photo sharing experience, with nothing about the unique descriptions of the photo that the user may have made. This helps ensure poor rankings in Google as well. Perhaps intentionally?
Kevin Yank February 22, 2008 at 10:52 am: A microformats-aware search engine was only a matter of time. I’m impressed that Yahoo! took the extra step of crawling for and indexing RDF metadata formats, however!