The Open Graph protocol is built upon the core precepts that a user’s social graph can extend far beyond simple relationships with other people. As we interact on the social web, we leave our footprints wherever we go—on particular accounts, websites, or any other social linkage. These links, called entity relationships, can vastly enrich the user’s social graph, delivering whole new unstructured content and user information that, just a few years ago, was really not available to us.

The Open Graph protocol seeks to give structure to those unstructured entities that are associated with a person, by providing an open, standard, and uniform method for working with these links to access an individual’s social data. It accomplishes this standardization through the use of semantic-based metatagging, which provides basic to advanced customization options for a site. At a base level, the Open Graph protocol defines simple information like the page title, the type of object that is on the page, a standard image, or a trackback URL. It then builds upon that core data by defining geographically significant information (e.g., restaurant locations), contact information for the site, and numerous object types that help further refine categories for a site.

The Open Graph protocol aligns itself very readily with a user’s existing social graph in an OpenSocial container.