Friday 4 February 2011

From the bottom up: growing the Semantic Web


RDFa is essentially a form of XHTML which incorporates a variety of RDF attributes and can adhere to the RDF data model. It's generally far less detailed than standalone RDF; but it does the trick for most web pages. (See earlier postings for some further information). As a Semantic Web aficionado, I was therefore pleased to read Peter Mika's recent blog concerning the recent growth of RDFa deployment.

Mika is a researcher at Yahoo! Research specialising in semantic search. His research is widely published and his role at Yahoo! has enabled him to analyse the growth of RDFa on the surface web. Mika's analysis charts the evolution of certain microformats and RDFa on the web, as percentage of all web pages, as indexed by Yahoo! Search. This includes over 12 billion web pages. The data collection was conducted at at three different time points over the past two years, thus allowing growth to be charted. There are some caveats with the data, but overall Mika found the following:
"The data shows that the usage of RDFa has increased 510% between March, 2009 and October, 2010, from 0.6% of webpages to 3.6% of webpages (or 430 million webpages in our sample of 12 billion). This is largely thanks to the efforts of the folks at Yahoo! (SearchMonkey), Google (Rich Snippets) and Facebook (Open Graph), all of whom recommend the usage of RDFa. The deployment of microformats has not advanced significantly in the same period, except for the hAtom microformat."
510% growth in 18 months??? What an incredible statistic. It doesn't matter that academics, the BBC, The Guardian, NY Times, data.gov.uk, DBpedia, digital libraries, the CIA, etc. participate in the Semantic Web using 'pure' RDF; it takes Yahoo! (which was leading the search engines in the use of RDFa) and Google (which recently acquired Metaweb Technologies) to motivate ordinary web developers to use RDFa. All of this is very motivating. I wonder where we'll be by October 2011? Hopefully Mika will update his blog sometime in the autumn!

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