Search, Structure and Knowledge on the Web

A significant fraction of the pages on the web are generated from structured databases. A longstanding goal of the semantic web initiative is to get webmasters to make this structured data directly available on the web. The path towards this objective has been rocky at best. While there have been some notable wins (such as RSS and FOAF), many of the other initiatives have seen little industry adoption. Learning from these earlier attempts has guided the development of schema.org, which appears to have altered the trajectory. Three years after its launch over 5 million Internet domains are using schema.org markup. Google has leveraged structured data in delivering its Knowledge Graph, and users are able to start asking more complex questions and find more relevant information more quickly than ever before.

In this talk, we will discuss Schema.org and Google's Knowledge Graph, as well as some of the interesting research problems being addressed in the context of current efforts.

R. V. Guha is a Google Fellow currently working on web search and artificial intelligence. He was the technical lead for Cyc, created the first version of RSS and was one of the lead contributors to RDF. He cofounded Epinions, and has been a researcher at Apple and IBM. Guha joined Google in May of 2005. There, he started Custom Search, Search based keyword tool, SMS Channels. He is the founder of Schema.org, collaboration between the major search engines, which provides a structured markup vocabulary, which is currently used by over 20% of the pages on the web. Guha graduated with a B.Tech (Mechanical Engineering) from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, MS in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley and Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University.