Bruce, you make an excellent point. So we do parse and store a long list of microformats, plus any RDFa we find (and even eRDF). You can get at this data and use it by going to the SearchMonkey devtool or calling the Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs. But as for our standard enhanced results (aka automated SearchMonkey, aka “SearchMonkey Lite”), this operates on a constrained list of vocabularies. The reason we don’t have automated presentations for all the popular vocabularies yet is because we have to carefully design those presentations and test them for search effectiveness first. But rest assured, they’re coming.

By the way, we’re holding a VoCamp at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus in June right after SemTech San Jose. If you or anyone else reading this post is going to be in the Bay Area then, we’d love to have you over to discuss vocabularies with our architect and SearchMonkey engineers.

Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

I like the way you set up the service for developers.

And I like that you allow different vocabularies. But it’s still pretty constrained. If you poke around my (currently sparse) site, you’ll see a fair bit of RDFa, using pretty standard stuff (foaf and dc). But for the most part, SM doesn’t grok it. I see no good reason for that.

Also, on your use of DC, good to see that, and the use of the new dcterms namespace. But, some of the details are wrong. For example, dct:creator is supposed to be a URI or blank node; not a string. The same is true of dct:subject.

I think Google’s intend supporting RDFa and microformat utilizes meaningful elements in HTML not semantic web. So there is no change in direction by Google.

Are all these complaints valid for SearchMonkey as well? If so, let me know what you think we should be doing as well.

That is NOT at all a compelling explanation. There are ways to better balance the needs here.

You could, for example, simply itemize links to the vocabularies you support (foaf, dublin core, sioc, etc.). That might include some examples.

Or consider the bibliographic ontology work that I’ve been involved with. We define some of our own stuff, but wherever possible use (and import, in the ontology) stuff from DC and FOAF.

So I hope to see you work more collaboratively on this stuff, and not reinvent the wheel on all of it.

Well, that’s true only in theory. In practice, well, SEO exists; with power comes responsibility etc.

rel=”foaf:name google:name”

This is not ideal, but it’s something we can work with.

I also think that decentralization on the Web is often misunderstood. The key point is that the technology of the Web is decentralized. But social factors push us back towards monocultures: 80% of the Web use the same web browser, the same web server, the same search engine. 80% of the Web will also end up using the same few vocabularies. What vocabularies will that be? Not the ones that two kids cooked up for a university class. For people they probably should have used FOAF, but in general I’m not surprised that Google feels a need to roll their own vocabularies.

There’s also a failure here from the RDF community’s side—we haven’t bothered to push our popular vocabularies, such as FOAF and SIOC, into usage with RDFa. If there was a significant installed base of FOAF+RDFa already, then I’m sure it would have found its way into Google’s documentation. But as it stands, all our cool vocabularies live in RDF/XML and SPARQL endpoints.