Semantic Library

Read/Write Web reports that Yahoo will begin indexing RDF and a range of Microformats. This is big news. It’s the first big sign that established, large players in search are including the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been under development for years, and now we are starting to get to the top of the mountain and see over it to where we can go with all these new standards and tools.

Yahoo has outlined what they will be supporting initially, and it’s a pretty big list -

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.

Yahoo has had some support for this already (check the review of Operator below) , but perhaps this will be just the push many website developers need to include Microformats in their sites.

Microformats?

They are a structured way to make use of open content on the Internet. If you would like to see what Microformats have the potential to do, check out the Microformats site. A practical way to try this out is to install the Operator plugin for Firefox. When enabled, if you browse a site that makes use of, for example, hCard, you can right click and download the data or use the toolbar to perform lookups on other sites. Having used Operator, in some ways Yahoo’s announcement about their support for the Semantic Web and Microformats is not such a surprise, as many of the sites mentioned below are Yahoo or Yahoo-owned.

Using Operator

Here I am on Twitter - using Operator I can export and save my hCard contact information, bookmark, or, here’s the really nifty part, add it to my contacts (if I was using Yahoo! Contacts, that is).

If I’m in Upcoming and see something I want to go to, I can add it to my Google or Yahoo calendar. Here’s an event I’m actually going to -

With a click it’s in my Google Calendar -

So why is this cool? I didn’t have to type a thing, or run a search. With Microformats I can extract information out of webpages, find related stuff, save details for later, in a really easy and time saving way.

How might libraries make use of it? How about quick downloading of records and citations out of catalogues and databases into other sites, an article or even into your mobile phone without having to go through painful export options? One click to store? I’d like to see that.