In the same way that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman, Facebook’s OpenGraph Protocol is neither open nor a protocol. It is, however, an extremely straightforward and applicable standard for document metadata. From a strictly semantic viewpoint, OpenGraph is considered hardly worthy of comment: it is a frankenstandard, a mishmash of microformats and loosely-typed entities, lobbed casually into the semantic web world with hardly a backward glance.

But this is not important. While OpenGraph avoids, or outright ignores, many of the problematic issues surrounding semantic annotation (see Alex Iskold’s excellent commentary on OpenGraph here on Radar), criticism focusing only on its technical purity is missing half of the equation. Facebook gets it right where other initiatives have failed. While OpenGraph is incomplete and imperfect, it is immediately usable and sympathetic with extant approaches. Most importantly, OpenGraph is one component in a wider ecosystem. Its deployment benefits are apparent to the consumer and the developer: add the metatags, get the “likes,” know your customers.

Such consumer causality is critical to the adoption of any semantic mark-up. We’ve seen it before with microformats, whose eventual popularity was driven by their ability to improve how a page is represented in search engine listings, and not by an abstract desire to structure the unstructured. Successful adoption will often entail sacrificing standardization and semantic purity for pragmatic ease-of-use; this is where the semantic web appears to have stumbled, and where linked data will most likely succeed.

Linked data intends to make the Web more interconnected and data-oriented. Beyond this outcome, the term is less rigidly defined. I would argue that linked data is more of an ethos than a standard, focused on providing context, assisting in disambiguation, and increasing serendipity within the user experience. This idea of linked data can be delivered by a number of existing components that work together on the data, platform, and application levels:

Entity provision : Defining the who, what, where and when of the Internet, entities encapsulate meaning and provide context by type. In its most basic sense, an entity is one row in a list of things organized by type — such as people, places, or products — each with a unique identifier. Organizations that realize the benefits of linked data are releasing entities like never before, including the publication of 10,000 subject headings by the New York Times, admin regions and postcodes from the UK’s Ordnance Survey, placenames from Yahoo GeoPlanet, and the data infrastructures being created by Factual [disclosure: I’ve just signed on with Factual].

: Defining the who, what, where and when of the Internet, entities encapsulate meaning and provide context by type. In its most basic sense, an entity is one row in a list of things organized by type — such as people, places, or products — each with a unique identifier. Organizations that realize the benefits of linked data are releasing entities like never before, including the publication of 10,000 subject headings by the New York Times, admin regions and postcodes from the UK’s Ordnance Survey, placenames from Yahoo GeoPlanet, and the data infrastructures being created by Factual [disclosure: I’ve just signed on with Factual]. Entity annotation : There are numerous formats for annotating entities when they exist in unstructured content, such as a web page or blog post. Facebook’s OpenGraph is a form of entity annotation, as are HTML5 microdata, RDFa, and microformats such as hcard. Microdata is the shiny, new player in the game, but see Evan Prodromou’s great post on RDFa v. microformats for a breakdown of these two more established approaches.

: There are numerous formats for annotating entities when they exist in unstructured content, such as a web page or blog post. Facebook’s OpenGraph is a form of entity annotation, as are HTML5 microdata, RDFa, and microformats such as hcard. Microdata is the shiny, new player in the game, but see Evan Prodromou’s great post on RDFa v. microformats for a breakdown of these two more established approaches. Endpoints and Introspection : Entities contribute best to a linked data ecosystem when each is associated with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), an Internet-accessible, machine readable endpoint. These endpoints should provide introspection, the means to obtain the properties of that entity, including its relationship to others. For example, the Ordnance Survey URI for the “City of Southampton” is http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/7000000000037256. Its properties can be retrieved in machine-readable format (RDF/XML,Turtle and JSON) by appending an “rdf,” “ttl,” or “json” extension to the above. To be properly open, URIs must be accessible outside a formal API and authentication mechanism, exposed to semantically-aware web crawlers and search tools such as Yahoo BOSS. Under this definition, local business URLs, for example, can serve in-part as URIs — ‘view source’ to see the semi-structured data in these listings from Yelp (using hcard and OpenGraph), and Foursquare (using microdata and OpenGraph).

: Entities contribute best to a linked data ecosystem when each is associated with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), an Internet-accessible, machine readable endpoint. These endpoints should provide introspection, the means to obtain the properties of that entity, including its relationship to others. For example, the Ordnance Survey URI for the “City of Southampton” is http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/7000000000037256. Its properties can be retrieved in machine-readable format (RDF/XML,Turtle and JSON) by appending an “rdf,” “ttl,” or “json” extension to the above. To be properly open, URIs must be accessible outside a formal API and authentication mechanism, exposed to semantically-aware web crawlers and search tools such as Yahoo BOSS. Under this definition, local business URLs, for example, can serve in-part as URIs — ‘view source’ to see the semi-structured data in these listings from Yelp (using hcard and OpenGraph), and Foursquare (using microdata and OpenGraph). Entity extraction : Some linked data enthusiasts long for the day when all content is annotated so that it can be understood equally well by machines and humans. Until we get to that happy place, we will continue to rely on entity extraction technologies that parse unstructured content for recognizable entities, and make contextually intelligent identifications of their type and identifier. Named entity recognition (NER) is one approach that employs the above entity lists, which may also be combined with heuristic approaches designed to recognize entities that lie outside of a known entity list. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are all hugely interested in this area, and we’ll see an increasing number of startups like Semantinet emerge with ever-improving precision and recall. If you want to see how entity extraction works first-hand, check out Reuters-owned Open Calais and experiment with their form-based tool.

: Some linked data enthusiasts long for the day when all content is annotated so that it can be understood equally well by machines and humans. Until we get to that happy place, we will continue to rely on entity extraction technologies that parse unstructured content for recognizable entities, and make contextually intelligent identifications of their type and identifier. Named entity recognition (NER) is one approach that employs the above entity lists, which may also be combined with heuristic approaches designed to recognize entities that lie outside of a known entity list. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are all hugely interested in this area, and we’ll see an increasing number of startups like Semantinet emerge with ever-improving precision and recall. If you want to see how entity extraction works first-hand, check out Reuters-owned Open Calais and experiment with their form-based tool. Entity concordance and crosswalking : The multitude of place namespaces illustrates how a single entity, such as a local business, will reside in multiple lists. Because the “unique” (U) in a URI is unique only to a given namespace, a world driven by linked data requires systems that explicitly match a single entity across namespaces. Examples of crosswalking services include: Placecast’s Match API, which returns the Placecast IDs of any place when supplied with an hcard equivalent; Yahoo’s Concordance, which returns the Where on Earth Identifier (WOEID) of a place using as input the place ID of one of fourteen external resources, including OpenStreetMap and Geonames; and the Guardian Content API, which allows users to search Guardian content using non-Guardian identifiers. These systems are the unsung heroes of the linked data world, facilitating interoperability by establishing links between identical entities across namespaces. Huge, unrealized value exists within these applications, and we need more of them.

: The multitude of place namespaces illustrates how a single entity, such as a local business, will reside in multiple lists. Because the “unique” (U) in a URI is unique only to a given namespace, a world driven by linked data requires systems that explicitly match a single entity across namespaces. Examples of crosswalking services include: Placecast’s Match API, which returns the Placecast IDs of any place when supplied with an hcard equivalent; Yahoo’s Concordance, which returns the Where on Earth Identifier (WOEID) of a place using as input the place ID of one of fourteen external resources, including OpenStreetMap and Geonames; and the Guardian Content API, which allows users to search Guardian content using non-Guardian identifiers. These systems are the unsung heroes of the linked data world, facilitating interoperability by establishing links between identical entities across namespaces. Huge, unrealized value exists within these applications, and we need more of them. Relationships: Entities are only part of the story. The real power of the semantic web is realized in knowing how entities of different types relate to each other: actors to movies, employees to companies, politicians to donors, restaurants to neighborhoods, or brands to stores. The power of all graphs — these networks of entities — is not in the entities themselves (the nodes), but how they relate together (the edges). However, I may be alone in believing that we need to nail the problem of multiple instances of the same entity, via concordance and crosswalking, before we can tap properly into the rich vein that entity relationships offer.

The approaches outlined above combine to help publishers and application developers provide intelligent, deep and serendipitous consumer experiences. Examples include the semantic handset from Aro Mobile, the BBC’s World Cup experience, and aggregating references on your Facebook news feed.

Linked data will triumph in this space because efforts to date focus less on the how and more on the why. RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and triple stores are onerous. URIs, micro-formats, RDFa, and JSON, less so. Why invest in difficult technologies if consumer outcomes can be realized with extant tools and knowledge? We have the means to realize linked data now — the pieces of the puzzle are there and we (just) need to put them together.

Linked data is, at last, bringing the discussion around to the user. The consumer “end” trumps the semantic “means.”

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