In these days of increasing violation of privacy by corporations and governments, more and more interest is drawn to methods to protect communication against eavesdropping. In this article in particular I would like to investigate some options to secure your e-mail communications.
The GoodRelations vocabulary supports three main concepts: a BusinessEntity, a ProductOrService and an Offering. Although Google currently only supports the latter two, it is expected that, in time, the entire vocabulary will be supported. Therefore I would recommend to not just follow the current recommendation, but to follow the official standard. Although the main concepts are quite self-descriptive, I will explain them in a little more detail.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned the Web, he envisioned a network of interconnected pages, accessible for humans and machines alike. Since then we have done a good job of building the first, mostly ignoring the latter. The Semantic Web tries to change this, by enabling content creators and distributors to mark-up pages with extra information understandable for machines.
The acquisition of Metaweb might come as a surprise to some, but the truth of the matter is that Google is coming late to the game. Yahoo! has been using their in-house developed SearchMonkey since early 2008, around the same time when Microsoft acquired Powerset (which incidentally used data from Freebase at the time) and recently Facebook launched their Open Graph Protocol.
The internet today exists of an enormous amount of HTML documents, full of structured data, which is largely inaccessible for applications. The reason for this is that computers are unable to autonomous determine the semantic context of these data. Because of this search engines can find, but not understand these data.
