Abstract

This report highlights the most important recent activity in the field of semantic web, analyzing the most innovative aspects of the new RDF 1.1 recommendation, and discussing the first public working draft of Data on the web best practices. The evolution of semantic markup is analyzed, both from the point of view of standards and the practical applications on the Web. Wikipedia is identified as a dynamic factor in the semantic web, especially through the DBpedia and WikiData initiatives. Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America are clear references in the description of networked digital resources.

Abstract

A general overview of the different semantic markup formats and the existing technologies to incorporate explicit semantic information (microformats, microdata and RDFa) is provided. Services are described that automate, to some extent, semantic annotation processes (Sindice, Calais, AlchemyAPI and DBPedia Spotlight), while characterizing the complete cycle of this process in a particular CMS (Wordpress) using a specialized plugin (RDFaCE-Lite). Finally, in order to quantify the creation and connectivity of semantically marked content on the Web, the space formed by all Spanish universities (and a selection of 25 international institutions) is analysed with Sindice . Semantic page count and visibility indicators (inlinks, outlinks, internal and third party) are calculated for the sample. The results indicate limited presence of semantically marked content in the universities and highly isolated web visibility of this content.