Dapper is one of my favorite screenscrapers and gets good use in my day job as a strategist. The company has come up with a new service called Semantify. What does Semantify do?
The Semantify service lets you present a semantically rich version of your site to semantically aware platforms, such as the Yahoo search engine, without changing your site’s pages.
Essentially while creating a “dapp” with Dapper, you need to assign fields to an appropriate scheme, e.g. Dublin Core, which ends up making the content to Semantically aware platforms
The way I see it there are two trends. One is services that seek to use NLP and other analytics techniques to find structure and extract entities from unstructured data (i.e. your usual web pages). Then you have services like Semantify that are anticipating services that are looking for Semantic markup. Will the increase in such services and the interest in the Semantic Web (which sometimes scares me, since too much hype is never good for anything) will be a driver for platforms that abstract out the Semantic layer or enable developers to easily incorporate Semantic markup? Given that Firefox 3 will be Semantically aware, as will Yahoo’s upcoming Slurp crawler, it would seem so. With more authoring tools (Drupal 7 comes to mind) that means more linked data, and more markup. I, for one, have already started thinking about making my own sites richer (e.g. I am currently working on a simple webpage with RDFa markup) and applied Semantify to bbgm as an experiment.
Here is a presentation from the Dapper team about some of their thoughts in this space
Further reading
Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb
Technorati Tags: Dapper, Semantify, Semantic Web
4 Comments
Neat! Any tips for Semantifying your site, or was it straightforward?
Neat! Any tips for Semantifying your site, or was it straightforward?
It’s easy enough if you know how Dapper works. The way you set up the Dapp doesn’t really change. You just need to make sure the attributes you assign come from an accepted namespace.
It's easy enough if you know how Dapper works. The way you set up the Dapp doesn't really change. You just need to make sure the attributes you assign come from an accepted namespace.
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