10. Overview of the Semantic Web,
Drupal, and RDFa
RDF is Resource Description Framework, a way
of breaking down any information into statements
made up of subject, predicate, and object– each
with an unambiguous URI.
RDF is coming first to Drupal as RDFa, inline
markup of content, which puts the theme layer
front and center of ushering in the Semantic Web.
11. The fundamental issue is that computers, all
attempts at artificial intelligence notwithstanding,
are not as good at understanding the written word
as people are.
12. A Pedestrian Example
Hi Jim, I can meet you in Cité
Université at 5 o'clock to talk
about RDF.
13. The Promise of RDF
“In a nutshell, the goal is to give true meaning to
Drupal's data. Drupal is capable of collecting and
presenting a lot of data, in no small part thanks to
CCK, now Fields in Core for Drupal 7. This data is
still meaningless in the Semantic Web sense
because other computer agents can't make sense
of the data that Drupal presents.”
“This Web of Data promises to be browsable just
like a huge database, e.g. by means of query
languages for RDF such as SPARQL (the name
similarity with SQL is not a coincidence).”
14.
15.
16. Drupal's long, checkered past with RDF
In the year 2000, on May 18, in the first commit
to the CVS repository that still holds the Drupal
project — back when Drupal was called drop —
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert included a file
called rdf.php.
17. A month later it was replaced
with a general framework geared to
non-semantic RSS XML.
25. As long as people had to handcode HTML to
blog and comment, there was no interactive
web.
As long as people have to painstakingly make
meaning of their information machine-
readable, there will be no semantic web.
26.
27.
28.
29. Enter the Heroes
Arto Bendiken
http://ar.to
RDF, SPARQL, Exhibit modules
with, on RDF module
Miglius Alaburda, Ben Lavender,
Jeff Miccolis, Frank Febbraro
31. And the one who answered the call
Stepháne Corlosquet
scor
http://openspring.net
32. scor has the coolest modules
as well as the coolest username
33. evoc
RDF External Vocabulary Mapper provides a
way to import external RDF ontologies into
Drupal for use by other modules (getting to
that).
Out of the box, this module pulls in the Dublin
Core, Friend-of-a-Friend, and SIOC ontologies.
You can then import any ontology RDF
Calendar ontology and it will be available to the
RDF CCK module.
34. There is of course one more
indispensable party we can't forget.
41. But computers can do cool things with it.
RDFa in Drupal
Examples and Use Cases
http://groups.drupal.org/node/20167
42. What Dries wanted.
1. Dublin core.
2. SIOC.
3. Match up RDFa output options to
fields (with CCK in core)
4. Export straight RDF also for same
data
5. Drupal 8: Import RDF!
46. Map!
In the other group we didn't worry about what
ontologies would do what mapping, but how
anyone could add any mapping.
47.
48. RDFa touches parts all over Drupal
● CCK
– Body, title, username, date as fields?
– User interface in core?
● Taxonomy as Fields
● Comments as Fields
● User Profiles using fields
● What content types and field and vocabulary
setup ships in a core profile? Currently, just
"tags."
49. What is left to do?
5 weeks to finish the incredible features we want
to see in Drupal 7, of which RDFa is one
interrelated part.
http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=RDF
52. Everything mentioned here
will be posted to
http://groups.drupal.org/semantic-web
and will be linked from
http://agaric.com/rdfa
53. People Making it Happen
Florian Lorétan
John Breslin
Frédéric Marand
Rolf Guescini
Benjamin Doherty
Stefan Freudenberg
Peter Wolanin
Barry Jaspin
Hinweis der Redaktion
Tough job, but someone had to go.
Welcome to Cambridge for Design For Drupal Boston! For those of you who have traveled a ways to get here, Boston is just over the Charles river that way.
Now, if we had RDFa in Drupal today, we would know where we are.
In fact, with RDFa, the camp website could continue to say "Boston" while your calendar and map applications could be told the exact, correct location.
It's hard to communicate here, but this semantic web deal is bigger than Drupal.
No really. Much bigger.
Bigger than Drupal even including the whole Drupal community.
Small proviso:
All right, it's not bigger than Drupal yet, because it doesn't exist.
Who knows what RDF stands for?
Very good, does anyone know what the "a" stands for in RDFa?
The fundamental issue is that computers, all attempts at artificial intelligence notwithstanding, are not as good at understanding the written word as people are.
Everything in green could be given an unambiguous meaning in RDF, and your calendar program and address book could add it all instantly.
This could be marked up inline, in the HTML, with RDFa.
That is unlikely in any scenaria.
But if this were an event content type you could see how each field could map to a meaning.
Which brings us to Drupal.
Dries blogged this on the occasion of this May's Galway RDF in Core code sprint.
This is awesome stuff, right? The latest and greatest in technology!
Yup, the latest and greatest... for the last ten years.
Drupal 1.00 offers backend/headline generation with RSS/RDF.
Placed in the root directory of the young CMS, the rdf.php file had an object-oriented implementation of a basic RDF-focused XML parser and had an RDF headline generator.
A moment of silence, please.
Drupal spent years wandering in the non-semantic wilderness
Drupal wasn't alone.
The whole World Wide Web wandered in the non-semantic wilderness.
It was just too hard to make the machine-readable data
This is an actual cover page slide of an actual presentation (about two years old) on actually doing the Semantic Web... they're doing it wrong.
http://www.slideshare.net/carsonified/practical-semantic-web
If you have to be a skilled craftsperson to make RDFa available online
If making your entire website present semantic data is like making this thing fly..
It is not going to happen.
We still have our problem though.
Stepháne Corlosquet - scor - calls this the chicken and egg problem.
Too few people would make applications that used semantic data when not many sources were making it available.
And too few people were willing to do the work to make data available that no one would use.
Which would come first?
But this is Drupal.
Our toddlers attend conferences.
We blow everything up every major release just to make it better.
We put in a registry system and take it out again between releases.
And some guy named Dries keeps going on about RDF too.
Another person to look for there is Mike Anello of DrupalEasy.com
And all kinds of things from Drupal shops like Lullabot.
There are some guys in the community too, i think, but not many important ones.
Enough preliminaries.
This is a web site without RDFa.
This is a web site with RDFa.
With.
[Flip back.] Without.
[Flip.] With. [Flip.] Without.
[Flip.]
With RDFa.
Any questions?
“I few months ago, I had a bar-b-cue at my house and invited the Internet to come over.”
http://www.commoncraft.com/pre-gnomedex-bbq-retrospective
Boris Mann, pictured, uses the phrase “robot food” to describe what RDFa is.
Boris is the one with the burgers. Not the Lullabot.
http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzz/trac/
Dries Buyteart’s priorities (as mentioned in a bar in Boston months ago) for Semantic information in Drupal core.
Scor invited a bunch of people to the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway.
Rolf Guescini, scor, stefan of Agaric, Frederic Marand, florian Lorétan, John Morahan.
Missing from that shot is Mark Birbeck and John Breslin.
And some guy named Ben Melançon.
Having traveled from all different countries to be together, we split into two groups.
Trying to answer questions like, “What's the best way to mark up an article with comments with RDF? What ontologies should we use? What's the best way to mark up taxonomy terms?”
He is in Wikipedia as the original proposer of RDFa.
I don't have anything to add to that.
Did that make sense? Let's try again.
This is not RDFa, it is a straight RDFa mapping, but you can already see how it relates to adding meaning to Drupal's markup output.
“The 'created' field contains a more complex array because it needs to be output as iso8601 and with a specific datatype.”