An enthusiastic group of data geeks and Semantic Web enthusiasts met last week at our Sunnyvale headquarters where we hosted the latest edition of VoCamp. VoCamps are a series of informal events that provide a small setting where the Semantic Web community can discuss issues related to semantic interoperability and creating, managing, and publishing vocabularies.

The format of VoCamp was conceived by Talis’ Tom Heath and Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, with the first installment organized in Oxford, England, in September, 2008. Since then, VoCamps have grown into a real movement, with events organized in Galway, Ireland; Austin, Texas.; Ibiza, Spain; and Washington, D.C., with more planned in New York and Bristol, England.

In Sunnyvale, we spent the first afternoon discussing three broad issues: ways of finding vocabularies on the Semantic Web, tools for mapping vocabularies and executing data transformations, and methods for lifting relational databases into the RDF world. Over pastries and pizza the next day, the campers worked in small groups on more specialized topics, including creating methodologies for vocabulary development, and developing a microformat for code documentation. (Many thanks to the microformat admins Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Ben Ward for bringing their perspectives to this discussion.) Other topics discussed included the Common Tag format and vocabulary visualization.

As Yahoo! Search moves toward a Web of Objects, we know that the developer community will be a critical component for creating a more robust Semantic Web. We were proud to play host to VoCamp Sunnyvale and look forward to future VoCamp gatherings.

Yahoo! Search

There’s been some discussion of late on search APIs. For those of you who might be looking for a Search API provider, may we offer you our complete set of Yahoo! Search Web Services for your programming pleasure?

With Yahoo! Search Web Services you can write programs using data from Local Search, News Search, Video Search and Web Search, among others. Our search APIs offer generous rate limits and are based on the REST specification. REST is relatively easy to get up to speed on and to use, no SOAP programming required.

Also, with our Site Explorer APIs, you can keep tabs on traffic and usage by querying for the pages in the Yahoo! index and the sites linking into a site. Additionally, we’ve recently added updateNotification, which you can use to update us of changes to your site.

If you have any questions or comments about our search APIs, please leave us a comment below, or better, suggest them at our Suggestion Board!

Amit Kumar
Yahoo! Search