Word Targeting Funnel

The Word Targeting Funnel (WTF) is a subset of Dublin Core that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic terms to be understood, ranked, and otherwise processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with Web Search. WTF has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both X/HTML and HTML5.

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.

This document is normative. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited from another document. WWW's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.

Word Targeting Funnel (WTF) is an open Web standard, introduced by search engines, that allows Web resources to define their context and meaning. WTF indexer directives consist of two major elements: Scope and Target. This allows authors to implement the WTF/1.0 standard with various techniques, such as META elements, GET parameters, and HTTP/1.1 headers (as well as microformats in WTF/1.1).

1.1 WTF Scope

The scope of a WTF indexer directive is either a document, or parts of it. For compatibility reasons scope gets addressed in the content attribute of HTML elements (X/HTML and HTML5), and in Content: tokens of HTTP/1.1 headers (not available with HTTP/1.0!).

The content attribute's value must define the scope in a way that parsers and ranking algorithms can process it. Examples of machine-readable WTF scopes are

document context:

Addresses a complete document, including its meta data.

meaning of terms:

Advises that all terms used in a particular document are defined by target URI.

alternate meaning of terms:

Provides additional resources to lookup terms used in a document.

term, terms [, ...]:

A comma delimited list of terms that are defined by target URI.

element context:

For use in microformats only (WTF/1.1).

1.2 WTF Target

The target of a WTF indexer directive is an URI that provides context or meaning related to the document that adresses it. The target URI gets addressed in the href attribute of HTML elements (X/HTML and HTML5), and in Href: tokens of HTTP/1.1 headers (not available with HTTP/1.0!).

If there's more than one single URI defining a document's context, or the meaning of particular terms for that matter, URIs must be separated by logical ORs. Example:

href=" http://google.com/search?q=WTF || http://bing.com/search?q=WTF "

2.1 META elements (HTML)

An example of an HTML document with a WTF document context declaration:

<meta name="WTF" content="document context"  href="http://google.com/search?q=WTF"  />

2.2 HTTP/1.1 headers

To provide WTF directives in HTTP headers use an X-WTF-tag header line like in this example:

X-WTF-Tag: Name: WTF, Content: document context, Href: http://google.com/search?q=WTF

2.3 Microformat [DRAFT]

This section is a draft, in other words not yet normative until a consent with microformats.org is worked out. WTF directives put as microformat might look as follows:

<p wtf-content="element context" wtf-href="http://google.com/search?q=WTF"> Latest microformat approved: Word Targeting Funnel (WTF) </p>

The WTF standard includes various subsets. Each subset clarifies the usage of target in a particular context and provides detailled instructions for search engines.

In the following we explain the WTF subsets which are currently implemented by all major search engines. There are more subsets (like WTFb, WTFo, WTFf ...

It is syntactically correct to address a particular subset, although it's preferred that the resource in target URI declares its relationship to a particular subset itself.

3.1 WTFa - Acronyms