La Web Semántica, Hoy

Hace casi tres años comentábamos que la promesa de la web semántica era convertir la red en 'un espacio auto-navegable y auto-comprensible.' ¿Dónde estamos hoy en día?.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Metadata

What can <META> Do for You?

The <meta> tag is often found at the top of an HTML document between the </title> and the </head> tag. It has a variety of uses, but one of the most common is the client-pull function, used to either reload or redirect pages after a specified amount of time.

Waller, Zach. Webmonkey (1996). Design>Web Design>HTML>Metadata

When Keywords Don't Deliver

If you’ve been working with keyword optimization for a while, you know there are times when some great keywords drive tons of traffic to your site, but the resulting conversion rate is terrible.

Usborne, Nick. nickusborne.com (2004). Design>Web Design>Metadata>Search

XFML Discussion Group

Discussion of xfml, the eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language.

Yahoo. Resources>Web Design>Metadata>XFML

The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful?    

The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset.

Sinclair, James and Michael Cardew-Hall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Use of Collaborative Recommendations for Web Search: An Exploratory User Study    

This study investigated use of collaborative recommendations in web searching. An experimental system was designed. In the experimental system, recommendations were generated in a group report format, including items judged relevant by previous users, search queries and the URLs of documents. The study explored how users used these items, the effects of their use, and what factors contributed to this use. The results demonstrate that users preferred using queries and document sources (URLs), rather than relevance judgment (document ratings). The findings also show that using recommended items had a significant effect on the number of documents viewed, but not on precision or number of queries. Task difficulty and search skills had significant impact on the use. Possible reasons for the results are analyzed. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Zhang, Xiangmin and Yuelin Li. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search>Metadata

The HTML HEAD Element

This article deals with a part of the HTML document that does not get the attention it deserves: the markup that goes inside the head element. By the end of this tutorial you’ll have learnt about the different parts of this section and what they all do, including the doctype, title element, keywords and description (which are handled by meta elements).

Heilmann, Christian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata

Choosing the Right Doctype for Your HTML Documents

In this article I will look at the doctype in a lot more detail, showing what it does and how it helps you validate your HTML, how to choose a doctype for your document, and the XML declaration, which you’ll rarely need, but will sometimes come across.

Johansson, Roger. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata

JavaScript Badges Powered by JSONP and Microformats

Using a bit of JavaScript, a nifty way of making remote web service calls (JSONP) and a few microformats, I can display information from one service somewhere else, leaving me with only one place to update it. In this article you're going to create a JavaScript badge that can be added to any site and which will display relationship data from a service which exposes it

Rushgrove, Gareth. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>JavaScript

Microformat Encoding and Visualization

So you have heard about microformats, read the introductory articles, and even bought the book. But now you are probably thinking "great - I have done my part to make the web a better place by adding microformats; what's next? What can people do with my data besides add it to their address book or calendar?" The intent of this article is to get you to think about microformats in different ways, and to demonstrate some interesting visualizations and mash-ups of microformatted content.

Suda, Brian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>XML>Metadata

Location-Based Publishing and Services

In this article, we'll look at ways that you can geocode your content, using data formats such as the location nanoformat, GPX and combinations of geocoded microformats in HTML.

Rose, Premasagar. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Geography

Accessible Folksonomies

I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible.

alt tags (2005). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Metadata

Death of a Meta Tag

The value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. Like Andrew, I say good riddance!

Sullivan, Danny. ClickZ (2002). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata

It's Time To Get Serious About Metadata

When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metadata.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill: Part 1

Metadata is one of the most misunderstood aspects of content management and website design. Editors and writers tend to look at it as a technical issue. Technical people look for a software solution. Both are wrong. Metadata is a fundamental skill that web writers and editors must acquire.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Metadata

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill: Part 2

Creating great metadata for your content begins with understanding who your reader is. What is the metadata they look for when they read a page of your content? What are the type of words they use when they search for your content? When scanning your classification, what are the "trigger words" that will make them want to go deeper into your website?

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Metadata

Metadata: Seven Tips for Writing Better Keywords

The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization

Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs

Which would be easier to remember: one thousand individual terms or three facets of ten terms each?

Tzitzikas, Yannis, Nicolas Spyratos, Panos Constantopoulos and Anastasia Analyti. ERCIM News (2002). Articles>Web Design>Indexing>Metadata

Faceted Browsing

Discover what "faceted browsing" is and other Web-focused terms for old ideas.

Instone, Keith. Instone.org (2004). Presentations>Web Design>Metadata

Use of Faceted Classification

Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. For example, some users shopping for jewelry may be most interested in browsing by particular type of jewelry (earrings, necklaces), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular material (gold, silver). “Material” and “type” are examples of facets; earrings, necklaces, gold, silver are examples of facet values.

Adkisson, Heidi P. Web Design Practices (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Faceted Access: A Review of the Literature

The purpose of this 1995 paper is to define what is meant by facet analysis, and to review briefly the history of facet analysis within the context of other types of subject analysis in libraries and within the context of information retrieval research.

Maple, Amanda. Indiana University (1995). Articles>Web Design>Metadata

Give Your Website a Location

One of the critical-mass elements for location-based services to actually be useful is for online content to have a sense of geographic context. We're already seeing it to some extent with services such as Flickr allowing photographs to be tagged with GPS coordinates: camera-phones with built-in GPS can automatically tag each photo with the exact location at which it was taken, and that meta-data can then be used to search for photos of a particular area or place.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Geography

XML Transformation and Metadata Repositories Enable Information Integration

Among the popular emerging integration needs in the market today is information aggregation, normalization, and presentation from multiple back-end data sources to front-end applications. Termed Enterprise Information Integration by some vendors in the market, this type of solution relies on a centralized common object model to provide a data access interface to client applications. Applications can used this common interface to request data from one or more data sources in a single query, with the intricate details of resolving the query left to the integration tool. This session will explain the architecture of an enterprise information integration solution in general, highlight some of the vendors and their approaches in this market space, and explain the use of such as solution through a real-world example with a large financial services organization.

Gantz, Stephen. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

The Atom API: Publishing Web Content with XML and HTTP

The Atom API is an emerging interface for editing content. The interface is RESTful and uses XML and HTTP to define an editing scheme that's easy to implement and extend. History, basic operation, and applications to areas outside weblogs will be covered.

Gregorio, Joe. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>RSS