Re: RDFa in Drupal core

Manu Sporny wrote:
> David Peterson wrote:
>   
>> One BOF in particular was really flowing and it went quickly from
>> microformats to RDFa and what can be done whithin Drupal [2] core to
>> enable RDFa. I had a continuing chat with Dries Buytaert (creator of
>> Drupal and CTO of Acquia [3]) where he expressed his continued interest
>> in making Drupal a linked data client.
>>     
>
> This is great news, David. We'd love to see Drupal adopt RDFa as their
> method of semantics expression. This would require a couple of things
> from Drupal core that I'm unsure of:
>
> 1. Does Drupal produce clean XHTML? If not, it should do so before you
>    start adding RDFa.
> 2. You will have to change the DOCTYPE and HTML version for any page
>    that produces XHTML+RDFa. Would this be an issue?
> 3. You may want to focus on not cleaning @about, @rel/@rev, @property,
>    @resource, @datatype, @property, @xmlns:XXX and @href (as well as the
>    other RDFa elements) from raw XHTML+RDFa markup. This would be a good
>    "first round" implementation of RDFa support.
>
>   
>> I think FOAF for each user is obvious, SIOC to describe the site and its
>> structure... then what? I am aware of Manu's great posts lately relating
>> to DIGG. I hate to ask this question (please no stones!) but why SIOC? I
>> keep wondering, what is the business case for its use here and how can
>> we sell it as "useful" to the Web 2.0 crowd? Don't get me wrong, I think
>> SIOC is great, but I am having a tough time selling the concept as an
>> enabler...
>>     
>
> That is a fair question - why SIOC and not FOAF for Digg? Is SIOC useful
> for Drupal's use case? The answer is that it really depends on what your
> website does - is Drupal going to be used for something that resembles
> Digg, or is it going to be used for something else (like a music or
> video blog)?
>
> If you would like to describe People, Projects, Accounts and Groups -
> then FOAF is probably better for your needs. If you need to describe
> Communities, Forums, Users, Threads, Posts and their
> inter-relationships, then SIOC is probably more for you. The beauty of
> it all, however, is that you can mix and match between the two
> vocabularies if you need to be more specific. For example, you can use
> SIOC for Communities, Forums, Threads, and Posts, but FOAF to describe
> the people and groups on the site.
>
> T
[SNIP]

David,

Apropos Manu's comments above.

The Linked Data Web is a collection of Data Objects ( or Entities) and 
associated Data Spaces (structured data container oriented points of 
presence on the Web ). Thus, to effectively model these spaces you need 
the SIOC Ontology.

For instance, Digg is a Data Space comprised of the following:

1. Threaded Discussion (a container )
2. Feeds (a container)
3. People who participate in discussion and contribute content 
(foaf:Person, foaf:Organization, sioc:User, Bibo:Document, foaf:Document 
etc..)

You may also find the UMBEL [1] effort interesting as it addresses 
linkage across ontologies associated with named entities.

Links:

1. http://umbel.org
2. 
http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/29/umbel-as-a-coherent-framework-to-support-ontology-development/

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2008 16:49:38 UTC