Abstract
The basic structure of web documents provides the desired appearance and functionality. By default, however, the content is human-readable only. You can use additional technologies to provide meaning to web documents, making them machine-readable and human-readable at the same time. There is a wide choice of metadata available, along with microformats and various annotations that can significantly extend the processability of web documents and the efficiency of web searches. Structured data should be added to web sites and conventional search engines changed from brute-force approaches to semantic parsing.
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Notes
- 1.
There are other techniques to achieve similar results. For example, web documents contained by a directory that is disallowed in robots.txt will usually be excluded from search results.
- 2.
Beyond microformats such as hAtom, hCalendar, hCard, and hReview, several web technologies apply the ISO 8601 date format for date-time representation, such as XML, XML schema datatypes, RDF, and Atom.
- 3.
The vCard notation BEGIN:VCARD is class="vcard" in hCard, N: is class="n", FN: is class="fn", and so on.
- 4.
If n is omitted but fn is present, the value of n will be equal to the value of fn.
- 5.
However, anybody can provide their own FOAF file and search for others’.
- 6.
EBNF is a family of metasyntax notations that can be used to express context-free grammars.
- 7.
It is possible to transform microformats to RDF using technologies such as XSLT and GRDDL, but such transformations depend on the vocabularies being used.
- 8.
In OWL Lite and OWL DL. In OWL Full they are equivalent.
- 9.
External .xmp sidecar files can be provided for all other file formats that do not support embedded XMP metadata.
- 10.
Google displays human-readable content only. Machine-readable metadata is not displayed. For example, the date declared as the content of the span element <span class="value-title" title="2011-12-06T20:00-08:00" /> 06 December, 8 PM</span> is the human-readable content, which is specified independently from the machine-readable attribute value of the title attribute in the ISO date format (2011-12-06T20:00-08:00).
- 11.
Markup is only one thing considered by search engines. For example, well-written, unique, and frequently updated site content is becoming more and more important for gaining better positions on search results.
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© 2014 Leslie F. Sikos, Ph.D.
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Sikos, L.F. (2014). Metadata and the Semantic Web. In: Web Standards. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0883-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0883-0_7
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