Blogging Roller

Facebook's David Recordon lists the positive aspects of Facebook's recent Open Graph Protocol moves and says its good for the semantic web.

The Open Graph protocol increases the amount of semantic data on the web in a manner that isn't specific to Facebook or any single social network. While we can all disagree about where the quotes and angle-brackets should go, at the end of the day I think we all can agree that this sort of metadata is good for the web

ReadWriteWeb says Facebook's new Open Graph could be a breakthrough for the semantic web:

One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We've written previously about the Semantic Web here, and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook.

Dare Obasanjo on the Open Graph protocol and the semantic web angle:

One of the things I find most exciting about this development is that sites now have significant motivation to be marked up with extremely structured data which can then be consumed by other applications. Having such rich descriptive metadata will be a boon to search engines especially those from startups since some of the big guys consider their ability to extract semantics out of HTML tag soup a competitive advantage and have thus fought the semantic web for years.

Nothing to argue with there. It makes me wonder, though, is Facebook really going to get behind semantic web tech and push things like RDF, SPARQL, etc. forward? Is Facebook really taking a semantic web or open linked data approach, or is this just tactical?