- From: Knud Hinnerk Möller <knud.moeller@deri.org>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:08:56 +0100
- To: martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
- Cc: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, bill.roberts@planet.nl, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web at W3C <semantic-web@w3c.org>
Hi Martin, On 25.06.2009, at 17:44, Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote: > Hi all: > > After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata > for their businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1], > I have quite some evidence that the current best practices of > using .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck for the adoption of Semantic > Web technology. > > Just some data: > - We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people > spend 10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of > themselves. > - Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 > % of them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root > directory. > - Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation > properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe. These are interesting statistics, maybe you want to blog about them or publish them in some other way? > The effects are > - URIs that are not dereferencable, > - incorrect media types and > and other problems. > > When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we > encountered a variety of configurations and causes that we did not > expect. It turned out that helping people just managing this tiny > step of publishing Semantic Web data would turn into a full-time > job for 1 - 2 administrators. > > Typical causes of problems are > - Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give > limited or no access to .htaccess) > - Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it > begins with a dot > - Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes > - Many users have access just at a CMS level > > Bottomline: > - For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an > Apache server so that it serves RDF content according to current > best practices. > - For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a > prohibitively difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a > variety in the technical environments that turns into an engineering > challenge what is easy on the textbook-level. For the cases where people still want to serve RDF documents, it would be neat if various CMSes had a simple way of handling content- negotiation. What I'm thinking of is e.g. a module for Drupal which would allow the Drupal admin to specify that, if rdf/xml for node X is requested (a page), serve RDF document Y. The content negotiation would be handled by php code in the module, hence no fiddling with .htaccess required. > As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates > "dummy" RDFa code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data > without interfering with the presentation layer. > That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any > XHTML document. I like it! It's similar to what our Shift tool [2] does for other kinds of data. However, this might lead to other problems: many CMSes only allow a subset of HTML in their input forms, so some of the RDFa could get lost. I remember this was a problem with Blogger in the past (not sure if this problem persists). Cheers, Knud [1] http://kantenwerk.org/shift/ > > > Any opinions? > > Best > Martin > > [1] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/ > > Danny Ayers wrote: >> Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill. >> >> Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format >> you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the >> single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the >> alternate representations for conneg. >> >> As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for >> RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good >> choice >> for typical Web applications. >> >> As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly, >> though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present. >> Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the >> surface area of the data. >> >> But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish >> data >> directly without needing the human element to interpret it. >> >> I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few >> years >> before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real >> benefit for the end user. >> >> my 2 cents. >> >> Cheers, >> Danny. >> >> >> > > -- > -------------------------------------------------------------- > martin hepp > e-business & web science research group > universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen > > e-mail: mhepp@computer.org > phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217 > fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620 > www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group) > http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal) > skype: mfhepp twitter: mfhepp > > Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of > Data! > = > = > ====================================================================== > > Webcast: > http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/ > > Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based > E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology" > http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp > > Tool for registering your business: > http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/ > > Overview article on Semantic Universe: > http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe > > Project page and resources for developers: > http://purl.org/goodrelations/ > > Tutorial materials: > Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A > Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and > Yahoo! SearchMonkey > > http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009 > > > > > <martin_hepp.vcf> ------------------------------------------------- Knud Möller, MA +353 - 91 - 495086 Smile Group: http://smile.deri.ie Digital Enterprise Research Institute National University of Ireland, Galway Institiúid Taighde na Fiontraíochta Digití Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 17:09:44 UTC