Month: March 2012

Semantic Search, Discovery, and Serendipity

Posted on by Richard Wallis

An ambition for the web is to reflect and assist what we humans do in the real world. Search has only brought us part of the way. By identifying key words in web page text, and links between those pages, it makes a reasonable stab at identifying things that might be related to the keywords we enter.

As I commented recently, Semantic Search messages coming from Google indicate that they are taking significant steps towards the ambition. By harvesting Schema.org described metadata embedded in html

Google SEO RDFa and Semantic Search

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Today’s Wall Street Journal gives us an insight in to the makeover underway in the Google search department. Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. They are going about this by developing the search engine [that] will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. The ‘amassing’ got a kick start …

Linked Data a Recipe for Food?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

What relevance does Linked Data have for a City’s food supply you may ask. “We live in a world where the agri-food supply chain, from producer all the way through to final consumer, is extremely inefficient in the flow of knowledge.. ..with the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies along the food supply chain, it will make it easier for all actors along there to know more about where their food comes from and where their food goes.”