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What is AB Meta?
AB Meta is a simple and open format for annotating pages that are about things.
A book publisher can use AB Meta to provide information about a book such as the author and ISBN, a restaurant owner can provide information such as the cuisine, phone number and address and a movie reviewer can annotate reviews with movie titles and directors.
The format allows site owners to describe the main thing on the HTML page in a very simple way - using standard META headers. AB Meta is purposefully simple and understandable by anyone. AB Meta is based on eRDF Standard.
The benefit of AB Meta is that it makes it easy for software to identify things--books, music, movies, recipes, restaurants, wine and more--inside regular HTML pages. With AB Meta, search engines can find and classify pages to help users interact with real things instead of flat HTML pages. Here are more benefits:
- Object-centric: Focuses on everyday things that we encounter around the web
- Semantic: Upgrades pages to be part of growing Semantic Web
- Lightweight: No complex markup, no changes to the body of the document
- Intuitive: The names of things and attributes are easy to understand for anyone
- Efficient: The meta headers are easy to get to without parsing entire HTML page
- Extensible: Additional attributes and concepts are easy to add
- Compatible: Alternative markup based on existing standards is supported
AB Meta Example: Book
AB Meta is best understood through an example. Consider a page that describes a book - a product page or a book review on a blog or a page on a publisher site. A simple example below illustrates how AB Meta can be used by placing the standard meta tags inside of the head element of the HTML page:
The object.type header above declares that the page is about a book. Additional headers specify the title and the author - a set of essential headers needed to describe a book. Next we look at the expanded example:
<meta name="object.type" content="book"/>
<meta name="book.title" content="Kite Runner"/>
<meta name="book.author" content="Khaled Hosseini"/>
<meta name="book.isbn" content="1594480001"/>
<meta name="book.year" content="2004"/>
<meta name="book.link" content="http://books.com/1594480001.html"/>
<meta name="book.image" content="http://books.com/1594480001.jpg"/>
<meta name="book.tags" content="fiction, afghanistan, bestseller"/>
<meta name="book.description" content="Story of an Afghan immigrant."/>
In the expanded example we added more metadata headers to describe the book. We used the same simple notation as in the compact format: name of the meta header described the attribute and the content specifies the value.
Who should implement AB Meta?
AB Meta is simple and beneficial for many web sites, because it makes the content more discoverable. Here are some examples of pages that are a good fit:
- Book publishers, book review sites and blogs.
- Movie home pages, movie review sites and blogs.
- Electronics manufacturers, electronics review sites and blogs.
- Record labels, music review sites and blogs.
- Restaurant home pages, restaurant review sites and blogs.
- Recipe review sites and blogs.
- Stock review sites and blogs.
- Wineries, wine review sites and blogs.
How is AB Meta Related to Semantic Web?
AB Meta is part of the bigger effort to annotate web content to be machine readable. This effort, broadly known as Semantic Web, was first suggested by Sir Tim Bernes-Lee. AB Meta is part of the so-called bottom-up approach, which is generally considered difficult because it requires the content owners to annotate pages. However, because AB Meta is really simple and easy to implement, many content owners will be able to support it.
AB Meta Specification
AB Meta is designed to leverage existing formats and vocabularies, such as Dublin Core. Many attributes can be described either using the AB Meta name or by using a name from an existing standard. The tradeoff is clarity vs. backwards compatability. For example, book.author is a better name than dc:creator to describe the author of the book, but the latter is already understood by many existing software systems.
For this reason some attributes may be declared in more than one way. Additional declaration is specified under Alternative column. Ideally, the search engines and other software should treat the AB meta declaration and its alternative in the same way as long as the object.type is present. It is also recommended that whenever possible the software should recognize meta headers without prefixes. For example, if the object.type is present then book.author and author headers are equivalent.
Required Meta Headers
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| object.type | dc:type | A required header needed to identify the type of the object. |
| OBJECT_TYPE.title | dc:title | A required header needed to provide the title/name of the object. |
| Valid object.type values: album, blog, book, gadget, item (use for apparel), movie, movieStar, recipe, recordingArtist, restaurant, stock, videoGame, wine | ||
Common Meta Headers
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| OBJECT_TYPE.image | Use this header to provide the image for this page. | |
| OBJECT_TYPE.description | dc:description | Does not need to be specified if description meta is used. |
| OBJECT_TYPE.link | dc:identifier | Use this header to overwrite the URL of the page. |
| OBJECT_TYPE.tags | Does not need to be specified if keywords meta is present. If provided, should be comma separated. |
album (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| album.artist | dc:creator | Comma separate multiple artists |
| album.year | dc:date | Year: YYYY. |
blog (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| blog.author | dc:creator | Comma separate multiple authors. |
book (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| book.author | dc:creator | Comma-separate multiple authors. |
| book.isbn | 10 or 13 digit standard ISBN number. | |
| book.year | dc:date | Year: YYYY. |
gadget (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| gadget.manufacturer | Commonly known name of the manufacturer | |
| gadget.model | Manufacturer specific model number. |
item (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| item.manufacturer | Commonly known name of the manufacturer | |
| item.category | Valid values: men, women, kids |
movieStar (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| movieStar.hometown | vcard:city | ||
| movieStar.birthday | vcard:bday,dc:date | Date: MM/DD/YYYY. | |
| movieStar.filmography | Comma-separated list of movies. |
movie (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| movie.director | dc:creator | Comma-separate multiple directors. |
| movie.starring | Comma-separated list of stars. | |
| movie.year | dc:date | Year: YYYY. |
recipe (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| recipe.cuisine | Comma-separated list of cusines. | |
| recipe.ingredients | Comma-separated list of ingredients. | |
| recipe.calories | Number | |
| recipe.servings | Number | |
| recipe.time | Cooking Time: HH:MM |
recordingArtist (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| recordingArtist.hometown | vcard:city | ||
| recordingArtist.birthday | vcard:bday,dc:date | Date: MM/DD/YYYY. | |
| recordingArtist.discography | Comma-separated list of albums. |
restaurant (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| restaurant.cusine | Comma-separated list of cusines. | |
| restaurant.address | vcard:address | US Address: Street, City State Zip. |
| restaurant.phone | vcard:phone | Phone: (000)000-0000. |
| restaurant.pricerange | Range: $X-$Y. | |
| restaurant.website | vcard:url | The URL of the restaurant web site. |
stock (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| stock.symbol | Standard US Stock Symbol | |
| stock.sector |
videoGame (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| videoGame.manufacturer | Commonly known name of the manufacturer | |
| videoGame.platform | Commonly known name of the platform |
wine (example)
| Header | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| wine.winery | ||
| wine.grape | ||
| wine.region | ||
| wine.points | Number | |
| wine.year | dc:date | Year: YYYY |
Can AB Meta be extended or changed?
AB Meta is designed to be extensible. Additional meta data can be provided by adding the attributes that are not part of this specification. If you'd like to let us know attributes that should be made permanent via this spec please email support [at] adaptiveblue.com with the subject line ab meta.
How do I add AB Meta headers to my Wordpress Blog?
There are many Wordpress plugins that allow you to specify meta headers. We recommend HeadMeta plugin by Dougal Campbell.
How do I add AB Meta headers to my Typepad Blog?
Currently you can add custom header to posts only if you are using Advanced Templates.
