Yahoo! to support semantic web standards; will microformats survive?
There’s been alot of buzz about semantic web technology, some people calling it “Web 3.0″. The idea is that will semantic tags your web page becomes a transportable data source; any data element can be used by other applications, easy to find and make use of. Yahoo! announced their next generation search engine codename SearchMonkey ,will employ RDF semantic web tagging and will support some microformats. RDF makes web browsers smarter by giving people more options when viewing a web page, such as adding you to their address book, adding an event to their calendar, getting directions to a place described by RDF, or searching online bookstores for a book marked up using RDF.
Search result without semantic tags
Same result with semantic tags.
Yahoo! Search product manager Amit Kumar discussed last week on the Yahoo! Search blog:
“In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.”
Amit Kumar
Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Will Microformats survive?
Yahoo! will supports only a few of the 90 plus microformats that exist today. Will search engines in general parse microformats? Will they continue to build parsers for new microformats or will they standardize on RFD? I think we will see greater adoption of RFD or RFDa over Microformats in the near future. Site architects should begin to consider this as part of their standards approach. For more technical information check out the W3’s RDF specification or this RDFa wiki.
