
The Quest for Semantics 11
Summing up, there has been an obvious trend toward adding more “struc-
ture” to Web resources. M any of the above examples are, however, not based
on any common standard and it is thus difficult to exploit this data other
than by using a website’s particular search interface. Comparatively few sites
provide structured data for download, even though this is already common
for some application areas. For example, virtually all news sites today export
data in RSS or ATOM feeds to which readers can subscribe. Th ese standard
formats encode data about n ews items in a way that allows them to be dis-
played and searched in a wide