While our regular blogger is out of commission due to surgery, we are reposting some of our favorite blog posts. The ReadWriteWeb post that was mentioned in this blog post was updated in October 2018.
Semantic Technology – Fact or Fiction?
July 12, 2010 – Real-life application of semantic technology at work with leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, using a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to add semantics to its web pages.
ReadWriteWeb shared this information in their post, “How Best Buy is Using The Semantic Web”. The Semantic Web is a Web of added meaning, which ultimately enables smarter and more personalized web applications to be built. Common examples of this are Yahoo and Google, but a more “ordinary” company is now applying semantic tools to real business problems.
The primary goal of retailers using semantic technologies is to increase the visibility of products and services. With data such as store name, address, store hours and GEO data being marked up using RDFa, search engines are now able to identify each of those data components more easily and put them into context. Best Buy reports this use of semantic technology has already led to increased traffic and better service to its customers. Sounds like non-fiction to me.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
