Feb 21, 2008
Yahoo Meta Data Search and Bibleref
At BibleTech I learned of an initiative to create a Bible reference microformat. At the conference we mused about a tool that would be able to spider these microformats and then return a set of matching results. So if I searched for Matthew 1:1, I would get back results where a bibleref metadata tag had been embedded on that page for that particular verse.
Well it appears Yahoo is working on a meta data search engine. I read about it on sitepoint.com and even found a link to the research version. Perhaps an engine like this could be told only to search for bibleref meta data. Tapping into a main search engine data store, like Yahoo's, is probably the only surefire way to return comprehensive results.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
David Peterson
G'day (sorry, couldn't find your name),
I wrote the blog entry you mentioned and currently the search engine only indexes 3 microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview). So if you started indexing your hBible it wouldn't pick it up.
The problem with microformats is that each time a new one is created the search indexer needs to develop a custom extractor to make sense of your microformat. That is why Yahoo microsearch is only indexing 3 of the most popular format.
If you used RDFa (soon to be released as a W3C Recommendation) to encode your Bible metadata, you would find that microsearch would extract your data instantly. This is because RDFa is based on a core standard that only requires one extractor to pull out any metadata.
RDFa is not hard to use either, it is more involved then microformats for sure, but it gives you infinite flexiblity and (as previously mentioned) all new metadata search engines will instantly pick up on it as it will be encoded in a standard way.
If you would like any more info on this please email me. I would love to have a chat.
Feb 21st, 2008
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