New ‘AB Meta’ Markup Tools Could Create a Smarter Web
Adaptive Blue, creators of the smart-browsing add-on, BlueOrganizer, have released a new metadata format that the company is hoping will make for a smarter, more semantic web.
The format, known as AB Meta, consists of a set of HTML head tags that allow you to quickly and easily annotate your pages with metadata that search engine spiders can use. AB Meta is specifically geared toward pages about particular things, for instance, a book, a movie, a recipe and more.
The goal is to make the web smarter by providing easier ways for page authors to create the sort of meta data that search engines need to connect content. The payoff for publishers is the potential to attract more visitors by letting search engines know, rather than making them guess, what your pages are about.
Thus far the promise of the semantic web remains largely unfulfilled, but small steps are being made. Developments like microformats, and now AB Meta, provide ways for web authors to tell search engine spiders about specific kinds of content — address book data, content licenses, book reviews, movie reviews and more.
The new AB Meta is best understood by example. Here’s what the markup would look like for a book:
And here’s a more complete, data rich 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.”/>
If you’re familiar with the eRDF spec (which is also the basis of the FOAF syntax), the format will look familiar. Indeed, many of AB Meta’s components were designed to map to an eRDF equivalent. For instance, in the example above the book.author attribute maps the eRDF specifier DC:creator.
The chief difference is that the AB Meta version offers more value to a search engine spider since it tells it that the person is the author of a book rather than a generic “creator” (which could also be a publisher, editor or any number of other things).
In short, AB Meta builds on the the eRDF foundation by adding a level of specificity that doesn’t exist in the broader eRDF spec.
Aspects of AB Meta might also remind you of some of the less used microformats like hreview. But where microformats are inline code, that is, the markup consists of specific class attributes added to HTML tags, AB Meta lives in the page header.
Of course, as Adaptive Blue CEO, Alex Iskold, tells me, “there is nothing that precludes having AB Meta attributes as classes in the microformat world.” As he goes on to point out, “this would allow annotation of the objects inside the pages.”
Iskold says that Adaptive Blue is “reaching out to Microformats community to talk about this.” In the mean time if you’d like to start using some AB Meta markup in your pages, there’s a handy WordPress plug-in, HeadMeta, that allows you to inject meta tags into the headers of individual posts.
If you’re not using WordPress, you may have to add the AB Meta markup by hand for now, though we suspect someone in the Movable Type and other web publishing communities will come up with something to automate the process before long.
For those of us running custom content management systems one nice aspect of AB Meta is that it generally maps to data you’re probably already storing. For instance if you do book reviews you probably already have info like publisher, date, links, cover image and more. So all you really need to do is create an AB Meta formatted template to display the data using the markup.
Of course all the semantics in the world won’t help your pages unless the search engine robots know what to look for. Thankfully Adaptive Blue says that the AB Meta spec was developed in conjunction with a “big web company.” While Iskold wouldn’t give up any names, it’s not hard to imagine this being the sort of thing that would interest Google, which has already embraced microformats and other metadata markup in its own apps.
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