We have been working on something very exciting here at AdaptiveBlue - annotation format called AB Meta.
What is AB Meta?
AB Meta is a simple and open format for annotating pages that are about things.
A book publisher can use AB Meta to provide information about a book such as the author and ISBN, a restaurant owner can provide information such as the cuisine, phone number and address and a movie reviewer can annotate reviews with movie titles and directors.
The format allows site owners to describe the main thing on the HTML page in a very simple way - using standard META headers. AB Meta is purposefully simple and understandable by anyone. AB Meta is based on eRDF Standard.
The benefit of AB Meta is that it makes it easy for software to identify things–books, music, movies, recipes, restaurants, wine and more–inside regular HTML pages. With AB Meta, search engines can find and classify pages to help users interact with real things instead of flat HTML pages. Here are more benefits:
- Object-centric: Focuses on everyday things that we encounter around the web
- Semantic: Upgrades pages to be part of growing Semantic Web
- Lightweight: No complex markup, no changes to the body of the document
- Intuitive: The names of things and attributes are easy to understand for anyone
- Efficient: The meta headers are easy to get to without parsing entire HTML page
- Extensible: Additional attributes and concepts are easy to add
- Compatible: Alternative markup based on existing standards is supported
AB Meta Example: Book
AB Meta is best understood through an example. Consider a page that describes a book - a product page or a book review on a blog or a page on a publisher site. A simple example below illustrates how AB Meta can be used by placing the standard meta tags inside of the head element of the HTML page:
The object.type header above declares that the page is about a book. Additional headers specify the title and the author - a set of essential headers needed to describe a book. Next we look at the expanded example:
<meta name=”object.type” content=”book”/>
<meta name=”book.title” content=”Kite Runner”/>
<meta name=”book.author” content=”Khaled Hosseini”/>
<meta name=”book.isbn” content=”1594480001″/>
<meta name=”book.year” content=”2004″/>
<meta name=”book.link” content=”http://books.com/1594480001.html”/>
<meta name=”book.image” content=”http://books.com/1594480001.jpg”/>
<meta name=”book.tags” content=”fiction, afghanistan, bestseller”/>
<meta name=”book.description” content=”Story of an Afghan immigrant.”/>
In the expanded example we added more metadata headers to describe the book. We used the same simple notation as in the compact format: name of the meta header described the attribute and the content specifies the value.
Who should implement AB Meta?
AB Meta is simple and beneficial for many web sites, because it makes the content more discoverable. Here are some examples of pages that are a good fit:
- Book publishers, book review sites and blogs.
- Movie home pages, movie review sites and blogs.
- Electronics manufacturers, electronics review sites and blogs.
- Record labels, music review sites and blogs.
- Restaurant home pages, restaurant review sites and blogs.
- Recipe review sites and blogs.
- Stock review sites and blogs.
- Wineries, wine review sites and blogs.
How is AB Meta Related to Semantic Web?
AB Meta is part of the bigger effort to annotate web content to be machine readable. This effort, broadly known as Semantic Web, was first suggested by Sir Tim Bernes-Lee. AB Meta is part of the so-called bottom-up approach, which is generally considered difficult because it requires the content owners to annotate pages. However, because AB Meta is really simple and easy to implement, many content owners will be able to support it.
AB Meta Specification
You can find the full specification of AB Meta format here.
What is next?
We had a pleasure of collaborating on AB Meta with another company - a major provider of web technologies. This company is planning to annouce a broader set of related specifications in the coming weeks. When that happens, AB Meta will become part of bigger ecosystem and growing body of open standards around Semantic Web. In the mean time, if you want to help us spread the word, please grab the AB Meta button and the link and put it on your blog or web site.
Feedback
We designed AB Meta to be simple, but also flexible and extensible. Our goal is to have community drive the spec, expanding it to handle other everyday things that we encounter around the web. So please tell us what you think. What did we get wrong? What other things we should add? We’d love to hear from you!
