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Marking up websites for The Semantic Web

We’re at a point now where we’re seriously talking to clients about semantically marking up their websites. The problem is clients a) don’t like jargon and b) Just want to know business implications and benefits.

So many people are baffled by techies jabbering away about the semantic web and the components that enable it.

There is an evident need for semantic technologies to be incorporated into websites and social networks. For the rest of us here is a breakdown of what the semantic web is and an explanation of some of the key technologies related to it.

A brief definition:

The semantic web is an extension of the web that aims to define the meanings in content so web services and applications and can better understand content and the relationships which reside within/around it.

All content on the web is generated for people to consume and understand, however we rely on computers to sift through it when we are in need of more defined content. People give computers directions on what content they’re looking for and sometimes the results are not always accurate.

Computers to do not comprehend content in the same way as people do therefore the semantic web aims to provide a layer of information that makes it easier for computers understand content, enabling “them” to in turn help people use content more effectively and efficiently.

This underlying layer of information enables computers to find more accurate content in relation to queries, understand content relationships much easier and also aggregate content much more effectively.

So what is this underlying layer of information?

Well some people are already aware of semantically coded XHTML (strict and proper use tags of Hx tags, div’s and presentational markup). It is now considered best practice web development and it makes it easier for web applications to understand the specific types of content that reside on web pages for example the noting of page titles, sub headings, paragraphs, quotes and the emphasising of particular words and phrases.

The types of mark up I will refer to going forward essentially build on the use of semantic XHTML:

Microformats

The official definition of Microformats from the Microformats website is follows:

“…a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured and web micro-content publishing in general”

I’m not going to go over every single type of Microformat in detail, they require extensive reading therefore and I suggest a Microformats book.

However I will discuss some my favourites:

XFN is a Microformat that links URL’s via relationships (please see my blogroll), it utilises the “rel” attribute on the “a” element to describe the link between two webpages for example;

<a href=”http://www.indolent.com” rel=”co-worker”>Mike</a>

As you can see the “rel” has defined Mike as being my co-worker.

XFN gets even more interesting as you can identify yourself to be the owner of various online accounts using rel=”me”, so for example; on my blog the outbound link to my twitter page will use rel=”me” and my twitter account will house a link pointing to my blog with rel=”me”.

Ben Ward writes a great piece on how the use of XFN and hCard combined can create a portable, reusable online profiles, portable social networks and consolidated identities. I cannot do his work any justice by trying to summarise it therefore I’ll leave it up to you to read what he has to say.

Ben Wards thoughts and the Microformats mentioned above need to be incorporated into social networking projects for clients as they provide users ease of use. There are thousands of social networks on the web therefore providing people the facility to join your social network using a consolidated profile or identity is much easier than asking them to go through a drawn out sign up process.

The whole concept of consolidated profiles and their use closely ties into the usability of social networks. With every other brand launching their own social network and people building their own social networks using facilities such as Ning and Kick Apps, it will not be long before people become dismissive of social networks which require a drawn-out or unique sign-up process.

This behaviour is comparable to the way people react towards purchase paths on e-commerce websites, over time usability specialists have told website owners to refine or cut back their purchase paths and this has proven to increase/improve conversion rates and volumes.

The use of XFN also removes the need for people to join a social network and manually search for contacts and friends as new social networks can attempt to parse existing relationships from websites the new user already is a member of such as last.fm or twitter.

So here are some of the business benefits…

When designing a social network your goal is to seek maximum engagement from your prospects. Make the journey to facilitate this as easy as possible through the use of things such as portable/reusable online profiles (hCard, XFN referencing + OpenID)
Also make it easy for people to bring their friends’ to your social network and find friends already on it by utilising XFN and parsing relationships from popular websites. The faster people find each other, the faster they can start engaging in conversation and interacting with your brand.

hReview

An explanation of the finer points of the hReview can be found here, in principle hReview allows web tools to detect that a web page or website contains a review of a particular item.

More business benefits…

You only have start have to thinking of the visibility opportunities that something like hReview can provide, imagine every product review on a large retail website or open social network is marked up using a hReview. All that information becomes instantly more recognisable and detectable by web technologies which acknowledge Microformats.

Search giant Yahoo and Technorati already acknowledge Microformats and I am sure that in the background Google are busy working at incorporating Microformats in their search algorithms, I believe we’ll see the use of Microformats grow exponentially over time.

Going Deeper - RDF

Slightly more complex, RDF stands for Resource Description Framework, it is a framework that can be used to describe any web-content. Descriptions are referred to as metadata, metadata is data about data. RDF is an application of XML, a language most people in the online world are familiar with as it is traditionally associated with feeds.

Many people in the on-line world are familiar with metadata because it is located in the head element of ordinary HTML webpages…this data provides web tools information about websites and webpages as a whole. RDF goes further and marks-up actual content.

I really recommend this article, which gives a more in-depth (but not too dry) description of RDF. The W3 have also give scenarios for the use of RDF.

RDF is definitely a richer way of marking-up web content, again just like the Microformats mentioned above it enables specific web services to pick up content that has been specifically marked up.

Yahoo have already acknowledged RDF through the launch of Search Monkey and Google rival True knowledge (in beta) also acknowledges it and uses to bring more relevant search results back to it’s users. I am in no doubt that the godfather of search Google will also start (if it already hasn’t) paying more attention to RDF and encompass it into its relevancy gauging and search algorithms.

I think the main business case for the use of RDF has been discussed above and whilst adoption and recognition of RDF by more web services is slowly picking up there is nothing stopping companies from starting to “future proof” their websites and make RDF a standard requirement in new build projects.

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