I had a chance to talk with Dan Brickley today, a semanticizer of the Web whom I greatly admire. He’s often referred to as a co-creator of FOAF, but these days he’s at Google working on Schema.org. He pointed me to the work Schema has been doing with online datasets, which I hadn’t been aware of. Very interesting.

Schema.org, as you probably know, provides a set of terms you can hide inside the HTML of your page that annotate what the visible contents are about. The major search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex — notice this markup and use it to provide more precise search results, and also to display results in ways that present the information more usefully. For example, if a recipe on a page is marked up with Schema.org terms, the search engine can identify the list of ingredients and let you search on them (“Please find all recipes that use butter but not garlic”) and display them in a more readable away. And of course it’s not just the search engines that can do this; any app that is looking at the HTML of a page can also read the Schema markup. There are Schema.org schemas for an ever-expanding list of types of information…and now datasets.

If you go to Schema.org/Dataset and scroll to the bottom where it says “Properties from Dataset,” you’ll see the terms you can insert into a page that talk specifically about the dataset referenced. It’s quite simple at this point, which is an advantage of Schema.org overall. But you can see some of the power of even this minimal set of terms over at Google’s experimental Schema Labs page where there are two examples.

The first example (click on the “view” button) does a specialized Google search looking for pages that have been marked up with Schema’s Dataset terms. In the search box, try “parking,” or perhaps “military.” Clicking on a return takes you to the original page that provides access to the dataset.

The second demo lets you search for databases related to education via the work done by LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative); the LRMI work has been accepted (except for the term useRightsUrl) as part of Schema.org. Click on the “view” button and you’ll be taken to a page with a search box, and a menu that lets you search the entire Web or a curated list. Choose “entire Web” and type in a search term such as “calculus.”

This is such a nice extension of Schema.org. Schema was designed initially to let computers parse information on human-readable pages (“Aha! ‘Butter’ on this page is being used as a recipe ingredient and on that page as a movie title“), but now it can be used to enable computers to pull together human-readable lists of available datasets.

I continue to be a fan of Schema because of its simplicity and pragmatism, and, because the major search engines look for Schema markup, people have a compelling reason to add markup to their pages. Obviously Schema is far from the only metadata scheme we need, nor does it pretend to be. But for fans of loose, messy, imperfect projects that actually get stuff done, Schema is a real step forward that keeps taking more steps forward.

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Here’s a recipe for a Manhattan cocktail that I like. The idea of adding Kahlua came from a bartender in Philadelphia. I call it a Bogotá Manhattan because of the coffee.

You can’t tell by looking at this post that it’s marked up with Schema.org codes, unless you View Source. These codes let the search engines (and any other computer program that cares to look) recognize the meaning of the various elements. For example, the line “a splash of Kahlua” actually reads:

<span itemprop=”ingredients”>a splash of Kahlua</span>

“itemprop=ingredients” says that the visible content is an ingredient. This does not help you as a reader at all, but it means that a search engine can confidentally include this recipe when someone searches for recipes that contain Kahlua. Markup makes the Web smarter, and Schema.org is a lightweight, practical way of adding markup, with the huge incentive that the major search engines recognize Schema.

So, here goes:

Here’s the Schema.org markup for recipes. author url

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Jeff Atwood [twitter:codinghorror] , a founder of Stackoverflow and Discourse.org — two of my favorite sites — is on a tear about tags. Here are his two tweets that started the discussion:

I am deeply ambivalent about tags as a panacea based on my experience with them at Stack Overflow/Exchange. Example: pic.twitter.com/AA3Y1NNCV9

I'd even go so far as to say folksonomy / tagging is the #1 overrated concept in the social media world. Sorry @dweinberger

Here’s a detweetified version of the four-part tweet I posted in reply:

Jeff’s right that tags are not a panacea, but who said they were? They’re a tool (frequently most useful when combined with an old-fashioned taxonomy), and if a tool’s not doing the job, then drop it. Or, better, fix it. Because tags are an abstract idea that exists only in particular implementations.

After all, one could with some plausibility claim that online discussions are the most overrated concept in the social media world. But still they have value. That indicates an opportunity to build a better discussion service. … which is exactly what Jeff did by building Discourse.org.

Finally, I do think it’s important — even while trying to put tags into a less over-heated perspective [do perspectives overheat??] — to remember that when first introduced in the early 2000s, tags represented an important break with an old and long tradition that used the authority to classify as a form of power. Even if tagging isn’t always useful and isn’t as widely applicable as some of us thought it would be, tagging has done the important work of telling us that we as individuals and as a loose collective now have a share of that power in our hands. That’s no small thing.

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