VCal RDFa and Search Monkey
I just returned home from the 3rd London hack evening, which is a highly productive get together of, well, nerds in Islington. With a nod to the done manifesto, I’ve continued on into the night and done what I’ve called a “Generic Event Information” enhanced search result format for Yahoo. It’s a little thing that you can choose to add to your Yahoo search experience.
One of the challenges with this work is that Yahoo has not given these widgets a particularly easy name to throw around, but here’s a picture to help explain things:
The text appears in a search result for Ultravox in London at the Roundhouse and as you can see it includes the usual snippet of text (or the event summary, if its longer) plus some very simple name value pairs – “Location” and “Starts”, which is altered to “Started” for events that have already started.
The idea is to answer the basic when and where questions common to events and also to allow users to quickly scan through search results and exclude events that they cannot attend and focus on those that they can attend, which is obviously those that they aren’t already missing! Therefore the “Starts” vs “Started” thing.
“Generic”
I can’t see a single person outside of the RDFa fan-club using this plugin unless it supports a wide variety of different sites and subject areas. There is no advantage to me in putting out something that only works for FeelItLive.com, yet its only FeelItLive.com that I’m aware of that is publishing VCal RDFa and Yahoo do not allow wildcards. I want people to use it, because I want them to focus their attention on my search results.
Chicken, meet Egg.
So, I’m doing two things:
- Labelling the thing generic – there is no point even mentioning FIL in the promotional blurb. It can only confuse matters.
- Inviting anyone and everyone to attach a comment to this post letting me know where they have published VCal RDFa. If they do that, I’ll do my best to support as many sites as Yahoo will allow.
I’ll also extend the same invitation to users of similar vocabularies (Edit: iCal, Event ontology, event microformats etc), though Vcal is the one recommended by Yahoo so I’ll have to see if anything else is supported.
Though it seems you have a point there, lemme give you two examples where RDFa along with DC/other vocabularies *is* used and makes sense, IMHO:
+ Digg (for example, see http://digg.com/d1nhP0)
+ Slideshare (e.g., http://www.slideshare.net/mediasemanticweb/linked-data-michael-hausenblas-2009-03-05)
BTW, I’m using RDFa+vCard on my ‘person ID page’ at http://sw-app.org/mic.xhtml, which, btw, nicely gets transformed into a format that you can directly use in you PIM or mail client (when you click on the business card icon).
Cheers,
Michael
While there is a general chicken / egg problem of support for RDFa vocabs in Yahoo’s enhanced search results (though not, I learnt this morning, with info bars) I’m not attempting to solve the problem for every vocab. I’m focusing on VCal specifically on account of having systematically published VCal myself.
It’s a shame Slideshare don’t allow you to publish VCal data on the event the slides were shown at. Using an enhanced result like the would help people to find the slides they saw. Adding support for the event ontology factor predicate would allow the slides themselves to be depicted in the result using the existing thumbnail.
Simon,
I think your implementation is very solid. But as you say, a generic VCal Enhanced Result app is tricky. Partly because Enhanced Results can’t act on * — but the other big problem is that SearchMonkey doesn’t take into account the user’s intent.
We actually have a lot of event data in our index right now thanks to VCal and hCalendar — an embarrassment of riches, actually. For feelitlive.com/events, those pages are really *about* an event, and so it seems reasonable to show the user calendar information 100% of the time. But the trickier case is a page like, say, http://tamu.edu. The vast majority of searchers who see this result are doing a navigational query, they just want to find the Texas A&M website. But there’s some small fraction who actually *will* be interested in Texas A&M’s calendar data.
This is a longwinded way of saying that SearchMonkey currently doesn’t do a great job of supporting “Generic Vocabulary” apps. We either need to A) add user intent to the SearchMonkey devtool, or B) create our own generic apps, and tell the dev community, “Here’s the Yahoo! default VCal handler! If you don’t like it, please feel free to override it and build a custom presentation for your own site.”
BTW, I think your app is almost certainly gallery-worthy for FeelItLive.com specifically. I don’t run the gallery approval process, but if for some reason it gets rejected, please email me at the address I supplied and I’ll help you tweak the app and get it approved.
Best,
Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team
Thanks Evan
One of the distingishing features of the Texas A&M homepage is that there is more than one event on the homepage. That’s a hint that the pages main role is navigational.
It should be simple enough to test in the app whether 0,1 or more than 1 event is present and if so, return null – signalling that no enhancement is possible. The intent of the application is to expose information about specific events, it cannot aid in navigation and should not try to – that’s your job
I tested this approach by searching for pages without VCal RDFa that matched my URL pattern and you seem to handle it OK, though its difficult to tell since the index itself is a little patchy anyway. I have similar checks in place for e.g. unrecognised date formats and foreign languages which I haven’t tried to support.
Another approach might be to insist on a dc:subject or foaf:primaryTopic predicate relating the page to the event, though this would make the slide share idea a little complex, and also your dataRSS conversion adds dc:subject anyway so it would be hard to tell the difference at the moment.
Feature request: SPARQL support! Crafting Xpaths over your bespoke dataRSS format is tricky!
Yeah — in fact that’s *exactly* what we’re doing for our video SearchMonkey rich result: http://developer.search.yahoo.com/help/objects/video. If we detect one and only one video on the page, we display the fancy enhanced result. If we detect two or more, we bail and show no enhancement. But of course that’s a very crude way to do things. A given page could have lots of different types of structured data… and figuring out the best presentation for the user will grow ever more complex as RDFa and microformats continue to become more popular. But as far as Yahoo! is concerned, this is a good problem to have.
SPARQL feature request: submitted.