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This blog now seems to be officially shuttered for the summer. ‘Cause it’s sunny out.
Elsewhere, though, there’s this: Metadata, Mark II, an overview of some nifty metadata technologies.
Update, 2008: Webmonkey shuttered its doors not too long after this article was published. I’ve pasted the original text of the article below, for sentimentality’s sake — one of the last freelance writing bits I did while living in Rome…..
Metadata, Mark II: FOAF, RDF, GeoURL, and SMBmeta
Remember META tags? Once upon a time, a finely crafted META keyword tag would get you the bourgeois treatment from search engines. You could specify exactly which search words should be associated with your site and, best of all, META tags were invisible to users, allowing webmasters a touch of the ol’ “editorial liberty.”
Yeah. That didn’t last. Almost instantly, META tags were abused and mis-used by pageview-hungry Web developers, who crammed all sorts of irrelevant and naughty keywords in their pages, trying to shunt the flow of Web traffic their way. And now today Google and other search engines essentially ignore META keyword tags.
(Of course, if you’re absolutely adamant that your page be promoted in response to specific search terms, Google, Yahoo, HotBot and the gang are happy to help, but with an improved targeted-placement technique far less attractive to spammers: It’s called Advertising, and it costs cash-money.)
End of story? That’d be sad, indeed, because META keyword tags were a rather sweet idea, at least on paper: short, sensible descriptions of your site, tailored so that machines could quickly read and index it, and subsequently help people find it.
Well, META’s not dead.
In the pages that follow, I’ll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web. Some are homegrown, some corporate, and some academic, but all of them let you enhance your site with useful information and improve the ways your site is associated with other sites. Sound interesting? Good, then here’s the game plan:
We’ll start with an explanation of that metadata word (so we can finally quit italicizing it).
Next comes a tour of the platitudes and latitudes of GeoURL, a fun, on-your-site-in-just-ten-minutes META tag that pinpoints your webpage’s real-world location with GPS-style accuracy.
Then we’ll check out SMBmeta, a newly launched metadata framework designed to give small businesses their fair share of the Web limelight.
We’ll finish up with a macro look at some of the “Semantic Web” standards favored by the W3C: Dublin Core and RDF — and we’ll show them off a bit with FOAF (Friend of a Friend), an application which leverages both those high-minded efforts.
OK then, let’s get started!
Metadata Background
A lot of smart people (like Tim Berners-Lee, who merely invented the Web) are still laboring to make the big dream behind the old “META keyword” come true. That concept is Metadata, which, strictly speaking, means “data about data”, but in our context means “stuff describing your Web page as a whole”: who wrote it, what it’s about, related concepts or categories, the date it was written or updated, the language it’s written in, who controls the copyright, physical locations it describes, if there’s a Table of Contents, etc., etc.
The point is, nobody necessarily wants to see all those details cluttering every single Web page. But if that data were invisible, machine-readable, and used to describe both the contents and context of Web pages, that would open a lot of possibilities, allowing Things of Great Niftiness to ensue. The W3C calls this ambitious idea the “Semantic Web”:
“The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.” Scientific American, May 2001
So having a metadata-rich Web wouldn’t just improve our user experience as we search and surf the Web, but it would also augment the ability for “robots” or software agents to collect and process information on our behalf.
When people talk about the “Semantic” Web adding meaning to the Web, it’s not really for you and me — you and I generally understand whatever we’re reading, and know which links we need to click to get certain tasks done — it’s about adding meaning that machines can process and navigate.
Whoooo! Robots! Software Agents!
Indeed. Which brings us to this rather key caveat: In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at a mishmash of different technologies that are not yet widely adopted, and may well never be. (That includes the aforementioned Robot Agents.) As of press time, not a one of these technologies will deliver the slightest boost to your Google PageRank or your listing on HotBot. And there’s absolutely no guarantee they will in the future.
Still, ‘tis better to lead than follow, and more fun to fiddle with emergent tech than to wait for the “critical masses” to show up and master it before you, right?
Let’s start, then, with a metadata application already adopted by thousands of webloggers, because it’s fun and entertaining but keeps its feet firmly anchored in the real world: GeoURL.
posted by Jason 6:37 AM
