Re: Fwd: [Linking-open-data] Drupal 7 to be a major linked data client

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:


> >
>  > The Semantic Web group (http://groups.drupal.org/semantic-web) will be
>  > one point of of discussion. Other than that, the developer mailing
>  > list and the issue queue for Drupal core will be the places where
>  > discussion and code happens.
>  >
>  > I have suggested that replacing the File API layer in Drupal core with
>  > some of the RDF code developed by Arto and Miglius would be a good
>  > starting point. The File API is a weak point, so attempting to replace
>  > it in the Drupal 7 development cycle -- and walking in the required
>  > pieces of the RDF API. The other area is data structures for the
>  > "content creation kit" aka CCK. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/9572
>  > for a post of mine linking to the discussion.
>  >
>  > Lastly, this is technology available today in Drupal 6 -- so anyone
>  > can install and kick the tires, and even extend to implement things
>  > like MOAT on top of the API. It would be great if folks outside the
>  > Drupal community that have much deeper RDF knowledge could jump in and
>  > see what works. Plugfests with data being flowed between, e.g.
>  > SPARQLPress and Drupal, would be another interesting area.
>  Yes, also note everything I've mentioned applies to 5 (I believe) and 6
>  :-) I think simply making existing Drupal data available in Linked Data
>  form, unobtrusively has immense value (to Drupal users and the broader
>  Linked Data Web / GGG).

This is very true for a lot of organizations, including the one I work
for, but there's two important issues that should perhaps be kept in
mind:

1. Switching from MySQL to Virtuoso represents a significant
architecture change, however painless the EC2 installation process may
be, and not many folks in the community are going to want to go down
that path without seeing some clear benefits right away.  It's
important to remember that the community is what makes Drupal so
valuable.  It's a significant challenge to to weigh a powerful new
architecture element against the distance it could theoretically add
between an organization and the numerous contributions of the
community; standards are important to Drupal's cohesion. Your
contributions here are very cool, but you might want to consider
working on them within the Drupal community or they are apt to be
ignored; certainly none of us working on RDF in Drupal had heard of
them.  Similarly, there's a database layer rewrite scheduled for D7
(see http://drupal.org/node/225450), and there's some people there who
would probably be very interested in seeing a copy of D6 working on
ODBC.

2. We're trying to do something a bit more comprehensive than output
Drupal's data as RDF.  We're talking about being able to deal with
triples all the way down, and both in and out.  How explicit that will
be to developers remains to be seen, but this is something more than
making another SPARQL endpoint.  We're trying to put the tools to use
all of those endpoints into the hands of everybody with a Dreamhost
account, not just those who can keep track of a relatively complex
application that spans a couple of EC2 machines.  This isn't
incompatible with what you've done; I imagine that many organizations
are interested in being able to scale up to something more robust if
the RDF sides of their Drupal installations take off.

>
> >
>  > Hope that helps present some context. I could probably close by saying
>  > that the Drupal developer community is a meritocracy -- "Talk is
>  > silver, code is gold".
>  We'll we've done the code (last year), so where the vault :-)

I'd really like to see this code (as I'm sure a lot of us would!).
Have you posted it somewhere?  There wasn't a link to it on the demo
site.  (This isn't meant to sound rude--you implied that you've
submitted this for inclusion in core, and I'm particularly interested
in seeing your schema).

Ben

>
>  Kingsley
>
> >
>  > Cheers,
>  >
>  > --
>  > Boris Mann
>  > http://bmannconsulting.com / http://www.raincitystudios.com
>  >
>  >
>
>
>
>
> --
>
>
>  Regards,
>
>  Kingsley Idehen       Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
>  President & CEO
>  OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 20:27:35 UTC