So last Thursday’s release of Semantify was a great success. Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW did a great job explaining a rather geeky product in an understandable fashion – thanks Marshall. As we go about semantifying the web, I wanted to point out something that may not be apparent immediately. Basically with Semantify, every Dapp becomes a valid RDF schema that is host on Dapper and can be used anywhere by you, even without Semantify.
Let’s see how using the good old MSN Search Results Dapp. If MSN would’ve deployed Semantify on their search results page (note the irony..), this is what Yaho’s semantic crawler would’ve seen. If you’ll look into the source code of this proxied page, you’ll notice the default RDF schema is defined by the Dapper “dapp-scheme” webservice. While you can choose to override this default schema by defining your own using the $namespace and $scheme variables in the Semantify code snippet, if you don’t, Dapper will use a schema created from your Dapp automatically. So now, building a Dapp means you also built your own RDF compatible schema, that you can use wherever by just pointing to the webservice:
http://www.dapper.net/websiteServices/dapp-scheme.php?dappName=MYDAPP
This may be useful for those people who would like to easily generate and use a schema focused around a particular subject where a wide-spread, all-encompassing standard has not emerged, or in cases where the currently available schemes are not good enough.
Finally, let me leave you with the following thought. Up to now, close to 50K APIs have been built using Dapper with hundreds of new ones every day. That means we have under our hands already some 50K schemes for tens of thousands of sites. Hopefully in the near future we’ll start commenting on what can be learned from this set.