As we wrote in the previous post, structured information is the main Web Trend in 2009. Today we call your attention to the real examples, illustrating this tendency.

OpenCalais

OpenCalais is probably the best representative of Linked Data (type of structured information maintained by W3C). Thomson Reuters, international business and financial news giant, launched API called OpenCalais in February, 2008. OpenCalais transforms unstructured HTML document in semantically labeled, organizing the information into groups: “people”, “places”, “companies” and others. Thus third-party applications and websites can use this processed information, creating new and interesting projects.

OpenCalais

Google Rich Snippets

This year Google added a special function to its search engine, so called Rich Snippets. This function retrieves and displays useful information from Web sites using open standards for structured information, such as: microformats and RDFa. Launching this feature Google asked web application developers to mark their HTML code. Implementation of this technology will take a lot of time, but the fact that such large companies like Google are developing these services shows the growing importance of structuring information on the Internet. Meanwhile, other large companies are also moving in this direction, especially Yahoo.

This year Tim Berners-Lee said that the Internet is becoming more  informational and now we are using information from the Internet  rather more often than documents and files as it was before. W3C, the  organization, which Tim Berners-Lee heads, supports two major  initiatives that focused on making the Internet more informational:  Semantic Web and the recent Linked Data.

Over the past few years we have seen some interesting examples of how  to structure data and provide the possibility to use it. The best  example of it is Twitter, which API is responsible for 90% of the  service activity, thanks to third-party applications, of course.

The basic principle of the informational Internet formulated by Alex Iskold has not changed: Unstructured information will be structured  and it will open the way to more reasonable use of the Internet. Web
application developers should remember this rule and provide only  easy-to-use and convenient applications to manage company  documentation, processes, and workflows. Companies, on the other hand,
should choose developers who offer only custom web application  programming services with easy content management.