Semantic Monkey

Well, it’s been a long time, a fantastically busy time and that’s the end of my non-excuse for the lack of posting of late.

I’ve just landed in Chicago to attend SES and discovered some weather for the first time in 15 months (you’d be amazed to hear you can actually miss weather if you move to California!) and a bank of Taxis outside the conference parading around with the new Yahoo! advertising on the top. I have a feeling this is a happy accident, but marketing is rather a ‘dark art’ so I’m not committing to that.

I’m here because I was asked to join a panel (Developments in Information Retrieval on the Web) and talk to the crowd about Semantic Data along with Jamie Taylor (MetaWeb), Martin Hepp (Universität der Bundeswehr München) and Jay Myers (Best Buy).

It’s a great panel - two guys capable of talking about any aspect of RDF and Microformats and two guys who’ve had the pleasure of learning from them and implementing structured data solutions. Jay works over at BestBuy where he’s done a cracking job of integrating structure on a public site with a massive catalog (~500k+ pages) - oh and he’s also been instrumental in developing the GoodRelations spec, so all-in-all a Semantic Superstar! That sort of implementation makes my life so much easier and hopefully, in turn, yours as Search Engines and aggregators start to use this structure to help you find what you want.

If you’re in town and would like to meet for a drink please drop me a mail, IM or reach out on Twitter.

UPDATE:

It’s all over, i’m heading back to California where white stuff doesn’t fall out the sky and coats are for people with holiday cabins in Tahoe. Huge thanks to Sean Golliher (great blog template, Sir!) for organising a great panel, it was a really enjoyable session.

Shame on those of us who felt the delay whilst Martin got his Mac ready would have made a good advert for Microsoft’s ‘I’m a PC’ series - the upshot is this great video of his presentation with slides. http://vimeo.com/8065914 It’s a pity we don’t have the full 126 slide original to compare it against!

In the spirit of sharing, as soon as I get to a stable connection I’ll be adding my slides to SlideShare and asking Jamie and Jay to do likewise…. more soon.

UPDATE 2:

I’ve uploaded my slides from the panel to: http://www.slideshare.net/NickCox/ses-chicago-2009-searchmonkey

UPDATE 3:

I just saw a Tweet from Jay Myers, now his slides from SES are up on Slideshare at http://slidesha.re/4UoQbg. 3 down, 1 to go!

If you’ve never done it, you’d be amazed at the havoc a 3 hour PST to EST timezone change can play with your body clock. Just as I was getting tired on the first night I realised it was actually 3am local time and I was due at the conference center a little sooner than I’d planned. Whinging aside, my trip to SES Toronto was worth every foggy headed moment.

My thanks to Jed, Anne and Bill for making it an enjoyable panel. We covered a good range of topics from how to utilise rich/social media to improve your branding, to the latest user-session insights and the benefits of using structured data and correctly labelling your content.

I also got a chance to revisit my TV career and remind everyone why I average about 19 years between appearances.  For those who follow these things my last appearance was in 1990 on the great BBC kids program Blue Peter.

Huge thanks go to the Yahoo! Canada team for their warm hospitality. If the chaps at border patrol don’t put out an APB for shifty eyed English guys, you just try and stop me coming back. I need claim my remaining 1min 13seconds of fame!

Yahoo! Placemaker

Recently Yahoo! launched a new Geo API called Placemaker. I’ve been playing with it all week and am continually delighted with the recall and accuracy it’s able to deliver.

Essentially you can pass in a text string or web document (structured or unstructured) and the service will identify, disambiguate and extract the places contained within. For example this sentence includes the location Sunnyvale, California which whilst seemingly completely out of context is where I work. I ran this paragraph through the API and here’s an extract of what was returned:

<document>
<administrativeScope>
<woeId>2502265</woeId>
<type>Town</type>
<name><![CDATA[Sunnyvale, CA, US]]></name>
<centroid>
<latitude>37.3716</latitude>
<longitude>-122.038</longitude>
</centroid>
</administrativeScope>
…
</document>

Along with the location name, a latitude and longitude of both the centroid and each corner of a bounding box we also have the superb WOEIDs (Where-on-Earth ID). Armed with all this information there’s almost no location based application I can’t build. Indeed sites such as Just Landed which searches Twitter for the text ‘just landed in’ and geocodes the places in order to provide intriguing visualisations just became as simple as tying two APIs together!

As a supporter of all things Semantic, it’s important to highlight that this API goes far beyond some complex string matching. Placemaker recognizes geographic semantic tags, such as the W3C Geo Vocabulary, and microformats such as geo and adr. Pretty neat huh? Drop a note in the comments below and let me know what you think about this and post any links to cool applications it’s allowed you to build.

As I highlighted a few short weeks ago, Google has been dropping hints about the Semantic Web so subtle that even us chaps realised something exciting was going on over at the Googleplex. During the Searchology conference (their annual slap in the face to startups who dared think they were on to something unique and exciting) Big G revealed that the Christmastime rumors of data islands were no more and that RDFa was accepted!

The announcement focuses on hCard and hReview, which if found on your page be will be turned in to a visual presentation and added to your result on their SRP. Sound familiar? If it does that’s because, as many bloggers pointed out, it’s incredibly similar to Yahoo! SearchMonkey Structured Objects. Competition aside, this is great news for publishers as it is yet another vindication of the benefits of structured data on your pages.

Google Rich Snippets

Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Where SearchMonkey has focused on complete Objects for presentation - e.g. a Video looks like this whilst a News article looks like that - Rich Snippets, as Google is calling this, call out single key/value pairs which can add value to a standard result. So far however their presentation appears to be behind flood controls as you need to add your domain to a waiting list. My hunch is that Google is treading carefully due to concerns as much about spam as the resulting visual impact on their end users.

Now that the top two engines are adopting public, open-standards we can expect to increasingly enjoy the benefits of ever richer, more accurate results with highly targeted presentations.

I’ve talked recently of my sadness at the lack of a central repository for ontological knowledge on the Web. Until the major players can sort that out (I really don’t expect it to be long coming now) on the Web there is plenty you can do back in the RealWorld(tm).

VoCamps provide a two day forum for vocabulary creation and discussions on the management of the Semantic Web. Unlike Semantic Web meet ups which typically take a few hours and focus on a single presentation, the VoCamp format is open and provides time to members of the community to talk about current issues with vocabularies and semantic interoperability and the chance to work in small groups.

If you live in the Bay Area and want to come along to a VoCamp and help shape the future of the Semantic Web please sign up on the VoCampSunnyvale2009 wiki page. Space is limited, but we will try to expand if necessary. The event is right after SemTech San Jose so you won’t have far to travel, and perhaps best of all it’s free!

I’m running massively behind on my Podcasts. The backlog has been building up for the past month whilst I’ve been focusing on that ever present joy - quarterly planning. As you might have guessed from my place of work, planning right now has a few more variables than one might hope for. Digressions aside, I grabbed a few hours this weekend to get psyched about Tech again.

Highest on my playlist was The Semantic Web Gang, and not just because my colleague Peter Mika was taking part this time. This is regularly a great show for anyone wanting to learn more. I ended up a little depressed as the conclusions of everyone on the panel sadly matched those I’ve been coming to for a while.

No one likes to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so before delving in to code most of us look around to see if we need to. When investigating Semantic Objects today there is no clear source of truth as to prior-art for any developer (corporate or personal) wanting to create an Ontology. Whilst this doesn’t surprise me at this stage in the Semantic Web, I am a little shocked that no one has attempted to take ownership of this space.

It’s in the interest of the community to offer a set of complete vocabularies for specific objects and all of us spend a fair amount of time trying to define the next set. With both these thoughts in mind, here’s my elevator pitch for a possible solution:

• Offer a gallery style view of known and ‘complete’ objects.
• This gallery would be user contributable.
• This gallery would allow for comments and feedback to the authors to ensure the needs of the wider world are considered by the authors.
• This gallery would offer links to ontology creation tools.
• This gallery would support and allow for group collaboration on the definition of a new object.
• When an ontology is complete and examples of real world usage were linked to by more than 3 people Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Google etc.  would extend support for it by adding crawler support (e.g. we would agree to accept this format for our indexes).
• The entire Ontology set would be made available under CC licenses (or most appropriate alternative) and ‘donated’ to the community to ensure adoption.

Why is ‘something’ like the above useful? It would be a start point for the confused masses. Does an ontology exist for ‘bicycles’? A simple search could return nothing:  You’ll need to go and create something, and here are some tools and access to a community. Or something: Here’s an ontology you can go and use or contribute to in order to extend it as you need.

Well, that’s one possible way to lower the barriers to entry which people are increasingly telling me are too high right now. What do you think, is there a better way?

A SearchMonkey 'document' template in action.

I’m delighted to be able to announce the launch of a new SearchMonkey feature which allows site owners to automatically benefit from the enhanced presentations (SearchMonkey apps) you’ve been seeing over at Y! Search without the need to write a single line of code.  

Until now, if you wanted to offer a visually rich result for your site on Y! Search you had to perform a few tasks; You needed to mark up your site with metadata, create an application to transform that metadata into a result presentation, publish the application and finally wait for our editorial staff to review your work. In the grand scheme of things this isn’t much to ask in return for the awesome user experience people will enjoy when they see your site in their results but it is, none the less, a massive hurdle for many site owners. 

As ground breaking as SearchMonkey was, we realized that we could make things much simpler. Specifically, from now on if you annotate your pages with structured data using vocabularies (formats) that we understand, we’ll do the heavy lifting. We’ll create an Enhanced Result for you and publish it for all our Y! Search users without you having to write a single line of PHP or even become the proud owner of a Y! user ID ! Obviously, if you want to customize the presentation of your data we’ve left you that option. You can still use the SearchMonkey Developer tool to write an application, but if you are happy with the new templates, you no longer have to.

Our new documentation not only shows you how to mark up your page for certain types of objects, but it also let’s you validate immediately if your markup is correct.  This is something that many have asked for in the past and I’m immensely proud of the team for delivering a solution. The first objects that we support are Video, Games and Documents, but more are on the way.

I believe this is an exciting step which will help drive greater adoption of RDFa and other forms of semantic markup. What do you think - have we gone far enough, what do you want to see in the future?