RDFa Rich snippets for educational content

LRMI, ,

Prompted by a comment from Andy Powell that

It would be interesting to think about how much of required resource description for UKOER can be carried in the RDFa vocabularies currently understood by Google. Probably quite a lot.

I had a look at Googles webmaster advice on Marking up products for rich snippets.

My straw man mapping from the UKOER description requirements to Rich Snippets was:

Mandated Metadata
Programme tag = Brand?
Project tag = Brand?
Title = name
Author / owner / contributor = seller?
Date =
URL = offerURL (but not on OER page itself)
Licence information [Use CC code] price=0

Suggested Metadata
Language =
Subject = category
Keywords = category?
Additonal tags = category?
Comments = a review
Description = description

I put this into a quick example, and you can see what Google makes of it using the rich snippet testing tool. [I’m not sure I’ve got the nesting of a Person as the seller right.]

So, interesting? I’m not sure that this example shows much that is interesting. Trying to shoe-horn information about an OER into a schema that was basically designed for adverts isn’t ideal, but they already done recipes as well, once they’ve got the important stuff like that done they might have a go at educational resources. But it is kind-of interesting that Google are using RDFa; there seems to be a slow increase in the number of tools/sites that are parsing and using RDFa.

One thought on “RDFa Rich snippets for educational content”

  1. Hi Phil

    We’ve been trialling RDFa breadcrumbs on the http://www.hw.ac.uk site for a short while now and it works well in Google search results (displays breadcrumb path for longer URLs instead of the full URL). Unfortunately, it seems to be incompatible with Google Custom Search so we’re dropping it for now.

    We have been using microformats mark-up on http://www.hw.ac.uk since early 2010 on pages with contacts (hCard) and events (hCalendar), and while the rich snippets testing is promising, e.g, http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hw.ac.uk%2Fnews-events%2Fevents%2Fgraduate-exhibition-fashion-show.htm our site is not yet supported in Google.

    It’s odd that recipes have seen so much implementation but interesting to see the success, and worth keeing an eye on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170 to see when more sites will be featured.

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