Update on Linked Open Data

Barbara Starr recently pointed out the growth of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. It is huge compared to the last one, DBpedia is all of Wikipedia in triples – well over 6 billion! Semantic SEO strategists anticipate Schema.org is going to send it through the roof.

Credits: Linking Open Data cloud diagram developed by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch.

The entire concept can be tied to a past presentation Barbara Starr gave, illustrating the growth of the semantic web – before Google adopted GoodRelations. When you look at the new LOD cloud compared to the time series and graphics in presentation, you will see the growth is crazy!

Linked Open Commerce (LOC) belongs in the LOD.

A snippet from LOC: “The centerpiece of LOC is the GoodRelations vocabulary as a global data schema for e-commerce and the Virtuoso database and middleware technology in the cluster edition. This is being complemented by: GoodRelations-compliant vocabularies for selected vertical industries, like automotive, real estate, tickets, consumer electronics, human resources. Crawling and data acquisition mechanisms that keep the data fresh and complete without putting too much of a burden on the providing web sites.”

Tests have shown a 30% increase in organic search-engine traffic to websites using Microdata or similar technologies. Search results with respective extensions get a 30 % higher click-through rate (CTR).

BestBuy 2011 Black Friday recent examples of Schema.org, Microdata, RDFa.