Originally published on semanticweb.com

A few months back I posed a question to the folks at DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) from the University of Ireland when they came to visit Radar Networks. This is a question that I have struggled with for a long time; seeking for answers anywhere I could. When I asked them, I heard the same question in response that I always hear.

Why? Why would you ever want to delete something out of the ontology?

Ontologies were not originally created to have things removed from them. They were created to classify and organize information in a relational format. Just because a species goes extinct it doesn’t mean it should removed from the domain of animals does it? Just like a car that isn’t manufactured anymore or a disease that was officially wiped out. These and many more are probably the reasons why Semantic Web gurus and ontologists alike don’t like the idea of deleting entities.

I am helping to create a social site where users generate content; objects, notes, data, and connections to others and other things that are their own. If they want to delete something that they have created, so be it. Sounds easy right? Well, yes and no. This problem is dealt with throughout computer systems. It is essentially all about managing pointers in memory. You can’t delete something that other things are pointing to. Who knows what will happen or how our application will respond when certain pieces of information are missing? Some things we account for on purpose because they are optional — but some things we just can’t. Every application has its unique constructs, whether it is built on a relational database or a triple store.

So what I have to do is define ontological restrictions, stating what links can and cannot be broken. On top of that, we must worry about permissions. Am I allowed to break an object link from someone else’s object to my own? Also, what if the object being deleted has dependent objects that cannot exist alone, or more importantly, don’t make sense on its own? A great example of this is a user object and a profile object. There should either be zero or two, never just one.

My friend and coworker Jesse Byler had dealt with a similar problem in the application tier a few months back regarding dependent objects. He had written a recursive algorithm that would spider the graph until it hit the lowest leaf node matching certain criteria and then begin to operate. I took this same principle and pushed it down into our platform and began to mark restrictions in our ontology.

This is where it became tricky. Some relationships are bi-directional and some are not. In the user and profile example above the relationship is bi-directional; however, many of our relationships are not. An example to this would be a group and an invitation to that group. Sure the group can exist without invitations, but the invitation cannot exist without the group.

All in all, the design pattern isn’t overly complex, nor are the ontological restrictions. But as a whole, it makes for an interesting problem with a lot of nuance. Careful consideration must go into this process because mistakes could be catastrophic. Data integrity is paramount and dangling references could leave the application in a terrible state due to one bad linkage. Although simple in practice, the execution is anything but.

And for those of you who are still asking yourselves why?

Here’s the answer. Scalability. As if working with a triple store wasn’t hard enough, keeping useless data around that will never be used again will definitely make matters worse. We are attempting to build a practical everyday application — not classify organisms. Surely there is a place somewhere in the mind of the ontologist where he can think practically about using ontologies for data storage. Isn’t there?

As more applications are built using OWL and RDF, this problem will become more and more real — and there’s nothing the ontologist can do about it but adapt, or die a little inside. Either way, at the end of the day, I am still an engineer trying to make do with what I have.

If we must delete, then so be it.

I posted this over at SEOmoz’s YOUmoz blog, their user generated blog. If you happen to be a member and like the article please vote for it so it will get promoted on their main blog.

From SEO and the Semantic Web on YOUmoz:

With the proliferation of the Semantic Web, all of our data will be structured and organized so perfectly that search engines will know exactly what we are looking for, all of the time. Even the newest of newbies will be able to create the most well-structured site that would take tens of thousands of dollars today. Everyone’s information will be so precise and semantically correct there will be no need for Search Engine Optimization anymore!

The fact of the matter is, this is never going to happen. Being a long-time SEO practitioner myself, I am very interested in the ramifications of the Semantic Web on today’s search, especially because I am tasked with optimizing Twine when it first becomes publicly readable this summer.

Before we dive too deep, let’s first look at what SEO experts and professionals do today. In a nutshell, we research, study, and test hypotheses learned by watching the heuristics of a search algorithm. We implement by writing clean and semantically correct HTML in certain combinations in order to allow robots to easier asses the meaning of a page. We use CSS to abstract the presentation layer, we follow good linking structures, add proper metadata, and write concise paragraphs. We organize our information in a meaningful way to show bots clean parse-able HTML. In some sense we are information architects, in another we are marketers.

But what would happen if a search engine company published their algorithm? Although that probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon, what if they would tell us exactly what they were looking for? That’s what the Semantic Web is going to do to search. Just the other day Yahoo announced SearchMonkey for just this purpose. It is only going to get bigger. Being told how to mark up your information certainly takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. But in terms of the role of the SEO expert or professional, I don’t think we can retire just yet.

The Semantic Web is organized by people just like the Web of today. The only difference is that now we are going to organize around better standards. Just as people have a hard time organizing their closets, attics, and garages, people have a hard time organizing their websites. Although the Semantic Web will add structure to the Internet, make it easier for novice users to create structured content, and change the way we search, there is still a need for experienced help.

Enter SEO. Some of our roles may have changed, but for the near future there will be still be a lot of similarities. The need to study and analyze robot behaviors to better tune information isn’t going away. They will still have to be on top of the emerging trends, search technologies, and organic ways to drive traffic. The fact of the matter is, nothing is going to change drastically for a while. In the near term, I am mostly worried about how to integrate Twine into the Web of today.

Not very semantic, huh? Well, that’s not say we aren’t going to integrate with microformats, display RDF in our pages, and publish our ontology. All of this is extremely important as the Semantic Web emerges; however, in a world where search is run by Google we have to cater to them. There are a growing number of semantic search engines and document indices out there, which are definitely raising awareness to the mainstream. Yahoo just jumped on the semantic bandwagon publicly and you know Google can’t be too far behind.

In conclusion, there’s nothing to worry about anytime soon. The SEO expert’s salary isn’t going back into the company budget. We still have to tune our pages to the beat of Google’s drum for the time being. When things do take a drastic turn, we will adapt and overcome as we always have. That’s what good SEO does. As for me, I will tune Twine just as I used to tune pages over at CNET, following the teachings of Sir Matthew Cutts et al.

Unfortunately its been a while since I have written anything new and interesting here although I have been working on some very exciting stuff (more on that later). In the meantime, Josh Dilworth from our great PR team at Porter Novelli submitted my last article to semanticweb.com and they published it! Its the first thing I have ever written that has been published somewhere besides this dinky little blog ;). Anywho, for those who didnt read it the first time, here is the article on semanticweb.com.

I recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Roundel Magazine, published by the BMW Car Club Of America, about my friend JP Cadoux at A1 Imports Autoworks in an effort to get the word out about what he does. I am kinda surprised they actually published considering I wrote in a serious manner but frustrated after reading silly articles about carbon fiber, xenon headlights, and other useless do-dads. Nevertheless, here it is.

In an effort to the use social media to gain more publicity for the fantastic work that JP does we created this video and posted it on YouTube. Within the first day it recieved a few thousand views and was honored for two weeks on the site. It generated a lot of buzz on the Internet and was picked up by Jalopnik.com due to an anonymous tipster (myself). Here is a link to the post.

When browsing the Gallery 2 installation on the A1 Imports Gallery I noticed that the default implementation was to use H2 as the headings! This is horrible, pointless, and not very well thought out. I realize that its not the job of the Gallery 2 engineers but they went far enough to make it an H2 so why not just make it an H1? Anyway the problem has been solved and we’ll see what type of results we get. Be sure to use them on your site, but use them wisely. A good rule of thumb is to only have one per page that is very specific to the content. Over-bloating your page with these tags will definitely send the wrong message to Googlebot.

I have had so many sites over the years and Im really sick of it! I finally have one site that I am happy with, serves its purpose, and is easily updatable. Although I am mostly a Java engineer, PHP is where I came from. There’s a right tool for ever job and this site is no exception. Wordpress is a great little app and suits its job well. It even loosely follows a pseudo type of tiles MVC system.

Just in case I get bored of the look I can always modify the view via CSS. Although this site doesnt validate due to Wordpress, its strict XHTML. Although tables are great for tabular data and I still believe in them this site is a table-less design.

In order to get the cleanest and best ranking possible, always redirect your subdomains (the ones not in use) to www! I cant stress this enough. When Google comes by and sees that http://site.com and http://www.site.com are the same it thinks that this is duplicate content, which it is! I just implemented this today for my friends site A1 Imports Autoworks. Go ahead, try it. Here is the rewrite for Apache:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^a1importsautoworks\.com(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.a1importsautoworks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I implemented Gallery 2 on the site in hopes of increasing page churns as well as pages indexed. It was very easy to implement and is much better than most PHP open source software I have dealt with. It only took a few hours to wrap it with the current site template and voila. Done! I will report back on the SEO implications. Unfortunately the URL’s a riddled with query parameters but thats okay for now. The gallery is located here

JP Cadoux, the owner and operator of A-1 Imports Autoworks, came to me in a quest to grow his business. He has been in business for himself for over 10 years, specializing in all car repairs, especially Europeans cars. He wants his business to grow as a whole but he wants to focus more on the custom fabrication portion. The cars he creates are extremely clean and meticulously fabricated making him famous, especially in the world of 1970’s BMW’s.

Although I did not design the site, I rebuilt the current design from scratch to lighten the page weight. It had originally been built by a friend of his who used Adobe’s GoLive which doesnt exactly output lightweight xHTML code. As always, the progress will be documented on my wiki, but the updates will occur here.

Here is what we are starting with
A great business with years of skill
Loyal clientele
Small web site (un-optimized and not indexed)
No logo

Our mission
Our mission is simple. Grow the business as whole in reach as well as appeal to the high performance tuner industry that JP knows so much about.

Goals
-Create a solid brand identity around performance and reliability
-Use the Internet as the medium to find and interact with the high performance car community (think YouTube).
-Build cutting edge “blog-worthy” cars to increase buzz and traffic to the web site
-Properly tune the website for the market we are after and optimize for search engines (SEO).