Semantify FAQs

  1. What is a semantic search engine?
  2. What is the Dapper Semantify Service?
  3. How do I semantify my site?
  4. How do I make sure my site will be understandable by Yahoo and other semantically aware search engines?
  5. Will you support sites that are built in languages other than PHP?
  6. Why only RDFa, what about other formats?

What is a semantic search engine?

A semantic search engine means many things to many people. In our context, a semantic search engine is one that "understands" the meaning of data and information it crawls.

For example, a semantic search engine that crawls a recipe site should understand that "183" is the number of calories associated with the current recipe, so that it can then make use of this information in its index, user interface and query language.

Recently, Yahoo has announced its search engine crawler, Slurp, will soon start "understanding" content embedded in sites in formats such as RDFa, eRDF and the various microformats standards. This announcment is a first step towards reaching a truly semantic search engine. One hurdle that still remains is the fact that Yahoo's engine still relies on the efforts of site owners and publishers to transform their site. In order to help publishers make their site "semantic readable" we have built the Semantify service.

What is the Dapper Semantify Service?

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.

For example, in the case described above, when Yahoo's crawler gets to a page of your site that is powered by Semantify, the crawler will receive back your page, only wherever appropriate, there will be semantic RDFa tagging embedded inside the page. All of your content and links will stay intact, only now, the search engine will understand that "183" appearing on the page has the meaning "calories", and "two cups of flour" has the meaning "Ingredient".

This will allow your site to be much more accessible and useful, and at the end of the day improve your SEO. As a side bonus, semantic aware applications, like the upcoming Firefox 3.0 browser will be able to automatically enrich the user experience as he browses your site. For example, a semantically marked office address will be optionally augmented by a map centered around your office.

How do I semantify my site?

To start, create a dapp for your site and define the various fields of content. At the end of the dapp creation process, choose the option to "Expose my site semantics to search engine" and you'll get a code snippet that once embedded in your site, will semantify it.

How do I make sure my site will be understandable by Yahoo and other semantically aware search engines?

In order for a seamntic aware application, such as a search engine, to really "understand" your semantic tagging you need to share one or more common vocabularies, called "Schemas". In their announcement, Yahoo announced their search engine will support for sure the following vocabularies: Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS. If you'd like Yahoo to understand your site's semantics in an optimal way, you would like to use one of these vocabularies if relevant to your site.

To do that, when creating the Dapp for your site, just give the right names from the relevant vocabulary to your Dapp fields. When generating the PHP code snippet for your site, define the namespace of the appropriate vocabulary as the namespace of choice, by changing the $namespace variable in the code snippet. In the future, we plan to incorporate all of these namespaces into Dapper, and intelligently determine which is the one most appropriate for your needs.

Will you support sites that are built in languages other than PHP?

Yes, we intend to. If your site is built using a different technology and you'll still like to use the Dapper Semantify Service, contact us and we'll help you make it happen.

Why only RDFa, what about other formats?

Our intention is to have the Semantify service support all of the major semantic web formats, both embedded formats such as RDFa and microformats and non-embedded formats such as RDF. Please contact us if you're interested in support for a different format.