Imagine you search for a camera, say a Canon EOS 60D, and in addition to the usual search results you’re as well offered a choice of actions you can perform on it, for example share the result with a friend, write a review for the item or, why not directly buy it?
Sounds far fetched? Not at all. In fact, all the necessary components are available and deployed. With Schema.org we have a way to describe the things we publish on our Web pages, such as books or cameras and with WebIntents we have a technology at hand that allows us to interact with these things in a flexible way.
Here are some starting points in case you want to dive into WebIntents a bit:
- Check out the WebIntents demos and learn about the use cases.
- During the recent Google IO 2012 there was a session on WebIntents.
- A SitePoint podcast on WebIntents is available.
- The Chrome Web Store has a number of apps that support WebIntents.
- There is a W3C Working Draft for the core specification as well as a W3C Wiki page that discusses passing schema.org data through WebIntents.
PS: I started to develop a proof of concept for mapping Schema.org terms to WebIntents and will report on the progress, here. Stay tuned!
Web of Data 
Would this be possible to use it with Drupal?Thanks
Posted by Sokratis | 2012-07-09, 10:05Sokratis,
Sure – it’s independent of the underlying CMS or Web application as long as they implement the interfaces as defined in the spec.
Posted by mhausenblas | 2012-07-09, 10:14Thanks for you post. E-commerce / search engines will benefit when they will allow us to save our searches as a sort of RSS feed. When new items that match the saved search criteria are added (price range, model, color, etc.), a new post is feed to us. Am I dreaming here? eBay offers it on its site. However, search engines would benefit from culling information from the entire web. I’m interested to hear from anyone about the feasibility of this or if any of the search engines are doing this yet.
Posted by Digital Asset Wrangler | 2012-07-10, 10:35