Semantify your site

March 20, 2008

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

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Comments

4 Responses to “Semantify your site”

  1. Eating my own dogfood « Research Remix on March 21st, 2008 6:51 am

    […] as data: bbgm used Dapper as a way to Semantify [the bbgm] site. Sounds fun, I’d like to try when I get a […]

  2. Heather Piwowar on March 21st, 2008 7:08 am

    Neat! Any tips for Semantifying your site, or was it straightforward?

  3. Deepak Singh on March 21st, 2008 8:51 am

    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.

  4. Semantic Web SEO : SEO 3.0 | How to Make Your Users Happy on March 21st, 2008 11:28 am

    […] Kirkpatrick writes about semantic web seo service Semantify by Dapper.net and Deepak Singh has some more bytes. Yahoo had also spoken about semantic SEO recently. Michael Martinez throws some light on the […]

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