Last update : June 29, 2013
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The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.
While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn’t a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement.
To turn a web page into a graph object, you need to add basic metadata to the page. The initial version of the protocol is based on RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in – attributes, W3C Recommendation), which means that you’ll place additional < meta>-tags in the <head> of your the page.
The Open Graph protocol was originally created at Facebook and is inspired by Dublin Core, link-rel canonical, Microformats, and RDFa. It is related to the semantic web.