E’ un susseguirsi di commenti e di rimbalzi, da questa notte, nella comunità del Semantic Web: Google dopo un anno che Yahoo ne aveva adottato il supporto, e dopo che ad ottobre era uscito lo standard ufficiale su RDFa da parte del W3C, arriva per ultimo, ma lo fa con grande stile.
Google supporta pienamente da oggi lo standard RDFa per far crescere a livello mainstream l’importanza dei metadata ( e del Semantic Web per inciso ), e lo fa introducendo le Rich Snippets!

As a webmaster, you have a unique understanding of your web pages and the content they represent. Google helps users find your page by showing them a small sample of that content – the “snippet.” We use a variety of techniques to create these snippets and give users relevant information about what they’ll find when they click through to visit your site. Today, we’re announcing Rich Snippets, a new presentation of snippets that applies Google’s algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages.
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they’ll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we’re beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags

In ordine di segnalazione, ecco il tam tam in Rete, per farsi un’idea:
-> Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa
-> Google announces support for RDFa
-> Ian Davis: Google’s RDFa a Damp Squib
-> Ebiquity research group UMBC: Google support RDFa and Microformats
-> Ivan Herman: RDFa, Google

Tutto visibile in queste ore ancora via PlanetRDF, aggregatore che seguo almeno dal 2005 su questi temi.
Sono commosso. Stamani l’ho scritto via SMOB e automaticamente è passato in Twitter, quindi nello status di Facebook e nel mio account di Identi.ca…

Seguire una tecnologia per anni, vederla crescere e vederla adattarsi al contesto, e poi finalmente vederla arrivare alla massa. E’ notevole devo dire. Io l’avevo citata questa tecnologia solo usandone il logo in una presentazione fatta al RomeCamp di novembre 2008, anche perchè è già attiva dal mese di dicembre, ancora in forme minimali, anche su Metafora AD Network… grazie al Social Semantic Banner, del quale vedrò di parlare in modo approfondito prossimamente. I tempi sono maturi finalmente! E’ ora di entrare nei dettagli tecnici…

Anche se questo è solo l’inizio, ormai un percorso è iniziato e certe cose assumeranno sempre più importanza:

How microformats and RDFa work

Imagine that you have a review of a restaurant on your page. In your HTML, you show the name of the restaurant, the address and phone number, the number of users who have provided reviews, and the average rating. People can read and understand this information, but to a computer it is nothing but strings of unstructured text. With microformats or RDFa, you can label each piece of text to make it clear that it represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating. This is done by providing additional HTML tags that computers understand. These don’t affect the appearance of your pages, but Google and any other services that look at the HTML can use the tags to better understand your information, and display it in useful ways—for example, in search results.
You can use either whichever standard you prefer—microformats or RDFa— and you don’t need to understand one in order to use the other.

Questa la cosa rilevante nel processo che sta accadendo: la community web è sempre più importante, anche per Google medesimo, nelle sue decisioni:

It’s fantastic to see them using RDFa for this task. It’s also fantastic to see them encouraging the use of a non-Google-branded vocabulary: open-vocabulary.org. Generic, reusable vocabularies built by industry groups, that’s exactly what we were hoping for with RDFa.

The side story here is that this was basically a Google-driven project from the start: they didn’t need the RDFa task force to create their vocabularies, to figure out how to mark up their pages, etc. Folks on the RDFa task force are finding out about this just now, as it happens. And we like it that way. RDFa is meant for communities of all sizes to mark up their pages, without centralized process overhead. Both Yahoo and Google’s RDFa launches were achieved without consultation with the RDFa community, and I consider that a success.

Metadata, vocabolari e l’importanza di aver capito davvero i vantaggi di certe cose senza interventi politici o di potere… c’è parecchio lavoro da fare per chiarire le cose ai non tecnici adesso… Un secondo step nella decentralizzazione al potere forse.

Credo che Simone non potrà che esserne contento, così come l’intero staff IWA .)
Approfondimenti nei prossimi giorni…