Presentation given at Drupal Summit Latino 2013 in Loja, Ecuador, covering the topic of the Semantic Web and Drupal 7.

1. The Semantic Web and
Drupal 7
Stéphane Corlosquet
Drupal Summit Latino – Loja, Ecuador
March, 2013

2. About the speaker
● Stéphane “scor” Corlosquet
● 7 years with Drupal
● Software engineer at Acquia
● Drupal 7 RDF core maintainer
● Drupal Security Team member
● Co-authored the
Definitive Guide to Drupal 7
● Contrib modules: RDF Extensions,
SPARQL, schema.org, WebID
● Member of the RDFa WG at W3C

3. The Semantic Web

4. The Web today

5. Many information silos
Image credits: www.pidgintech.com

6. Many isolated and disparate communities
Image credits: www.pidgintech.com

7. Growing amount of information
● Blogs, News, Comments
● Social platforms: Facebook, Google plus
● Everyday more and more content is published
● Desktop, laptops, tablets, smartphones...
● Sensor data for weather, traffic, healthcare
● Billions of public pages
● Deep web?

8. What do machines see?

9. Challenge:
How can machines help us
search all this information?

10. Vision of the Semantic Web
● Transition to the Giant Global Graph
● WWW = content+links
● GGG = WWW+relationships+descriptions
● Universal medium for data, information and
knowledge exchange

11. Evolution of the Web

12. The One Machine
● All devices connected
● Personal computers
● Data servers
● Cell phones
● PDAs
● RFID tags
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/11/dimensions_of_t.php

13. Key
● Agree on Standards
● Open Data

14. Rich Snippets

15. Google

16. Yahoo!

17. Bing

18. Why Structured Data in HTML
● Helps machines extract
relevant data from HTML
● Can make use of this data
in new ways:
–enhanced search results
– Knowledge graph
● Search engines only index HTML

19. Structured Data in HTML
● HTML attributes
● Syntaxes
– Microformats (@class, @rel)
– RDFa (@property, @typeof, @resource…)
– Microdata (@itemscope, @itemtype, @itemprop, …)

20. Structured Data in HTML
● Evolution and cross-syntax influence

21. Schema.org

22. Schema.org
● Describe the type of your content (Person,
Event, Recipe, Product, Book, Movie, etc.)
– 416 types and counting
● Each type has a set of properties
– Common properties: name, description, image, url
– Specific properties depending on the type (see type page
on schema.org)
– 544 properties and counting

23. Credits: Dan Brickley - link.

24. Schema.org

25. How does schema.org apply to Drupal?
● Content types

26. How does schema.org apply to Drupal?
● From content types to RDF

27. Schema.org module for Drupal
● Map your content types and fields to the
schema.org terms
http://drupal.org/project/schemaorg

28. Content types and Fields

29. Content types and Fields

30. Content types and Fields

31. Example: Event

32. Rich Snippet testing tool
● http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

33. Examples
● Events
– “force11 events”: http://goo.gl/VVhNM
– DrupalCon Munich: http://goo.gl/jgMvw
– University of Waterloo: http://goo.gl/Df9hp
● Person
– DGD7 – Jacine Luisi: http://t.co/rTK8N9K2
– Stéphane Corlosquet: http://goo.gl/9dWdL

34. Drupal, rNews and RDFa
Open Publish
● Free Drupal distribution for building News sites
● rNews support in RDFa
● Download

35. Useful modules
● http://drupal.org/project/schemaorg
– UI for mapping content types and fields to schema.org
– Documentation on drupal.org
– Screencast + examples
● http://drupal.org/project/rdfa
– Implements the latest RDFa 1.1 (Drupal core is 1.0)
– HTML5 and RDFa
– Under development
● http://drupal.org/project/microdata
– Standalone module
– HTML5 Microdata

36. Schema.org module
Play time!
http://bit.ly/schema-event
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

37. Beyond SEO:
How is RDF architected
in Drupal 7

38. History of RDF in Drupal
● rdf.php (2000, Dries)
● FOAF, vCard (2004, walkah)
● Relationship (2005, dman)
● Semantic Search (2006, hendler)
● RDF (2007, Arto)
● OpenCalais (febbraro, 2008)
● RDF CCK (2008, scor)

39. Architecture
● User driven data model
● Content type => RDF class
● Field => RDF property
● Node => RDF resource
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oriente_Station_Lisboa_roof.jpg

40. Content types and Fields

41. Content types and Fields

42. Node

43. Drupal 7 and RDF
● The RDF mapping API allows any vocabulary
● Default mappings on blogs, forums, comments,
etc. using FOAF, SIOC, DC, SKOS
● Drupal 7 core outputs these mappings in RDFa
● Mappings can be changed to include other
vocabularies like schema.org

44. Drupal 7 default RDF mappings

45. Drupal 7 core RDF limitations
● No schema.org out of the box
● No UI for managing the RDF mappings
● Only core fields are supported (text, file, image)
– No support for contrib fields: addressfield, fivestar
● No native support for Views or Panels
– Display suite 2.0 is OK
● Some contrib modules can help
● Drupal 8 to fix these many of these issues

46. Drupal 7 and RDF
● Contributed module for more features
● RDF Extensions
● Serialization formats: RDF/XML, Turtle, N-Triples
● Mapping UI
● SPARQL
● Expose Drupal RDF data in a SPARQL Endpoint
● SPARQL Views
● Display remote RDF data in Drupal using SPARQL
● JSON-LD
● Expose Drupal RDF data as JSON-LD (CORS-enabled)
● Features and packaging
● Build distributions / deployment workflow

47. SPARQL Endpoint
● Indexing
http://drupal.org/project/sparql

48. SPARQL Endpoint
● Public endpoint available at /sparql
● http://prefix.cc/sioc,rnews.sparql

49. RDFa 1.1
● Published as W3C Recommendation
● RDFa Lite
● RDFa 1.1 Full
● Leaner markup
● http://rdfa.info/play/

50. RDFa 1.1
● Works with HTML5
● No dependency on XHTML
● HTML5 doctype
● Popular themes have been updated (Omega,
Zen, Adaptive Themes)

51. Demos
rNews by International Press
Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
– Open Publish
PREFIX rnews: <http://iptc.org/std/rNews/2011-10-07#>
SELECT * WHERE {
?s a rnews:Article;
rnews:name ?title.
}

52. JSON-LD in Drupal
● Client side as well as server side friendly
● Browser Scripting:
– Native javascript format
– RDFa API in the DOM
● Data can be fetched from anywhere:
– Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) enabled
● Client can mash data
● http://drupal.org/project/jsonld

53. Demos
● Occupy Directory
– http://directory.occupy.net/occupations
– JSON-LD: http://directory.occupy.net/node/19652.jsonld
● Federated General Assembly
– Drupal distribution for occupy movement
– http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/Federated_General_Assembly

54. Domeo + Drupal
● Data mash up from independent, but related
sources

55. Domeo + Drupal
● Data mash up from independent, but related
sources

56. Thanks!
● Stéphane Corlosquet: scorlosquet@gmail.com
– @scorlosquet
– http://openspring.net/