Barbara Starr posts at Search Engine Land about progress the notion of “semantic search” has made in the past three years, Semantic and Graph-Based Search: The Future Face Of Search:

“The prediction that search would become increasingly semantic and graph-based has certainly proven to be more than true. Not only have the search engines since adopted schema.org as a standard along with microdata as a syntax (Facebook RDFa and Open Graph are examples), but things are now elevated to the next level in this process of adoption.”

The schema.org vocabulary has been a big success and is being used by many popular content providers, but I’m less sure that Microdata is winning out over RDFa. I’ve seen reports that there is more data on the Web encoded in RDFa than Microdata.

It seems like an easy choice to use RDFa Lite over Microdata, since it’s just as simple and easy to use and lets you later add more features from full RDFa. The biggest RDFa feature is, of course, the ability to include statements from multiple vocabularies.

In the spirit of eating our own dog food, I hope to work on upgrading the ebiquity web site and blog to make fuller use of RDFa this summer.