RDFa in Drupal core

Hello all,

I recently attended Drupalcon Szeged [1] in Hungary. There was a great 
interest in Semantic Web tech and in particular RDFa. Whilst there were 
no scheduled presentations on RDFa, there were a few BOFs on 
microformats and RDFa.

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.

To get things into core is very difficult, even for Dries. So he is 
looking for the least painful way to make it happen. So the discussion 
we had was on vocabularies; essentially what vocabularies can be 
burned-in and thusly immediately useful.

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...

This would be a big win for RDFa. If the right case is made (and it is 
nearly there) for RDFa to be "on" by default, then within a year of 
Drupal 7's release there would be roughly ~100 thousand sites. That is a 
lot of RDFa and a lot of rich data for Searchmonkey and Sindice (amongst 
others) to play with.

Let me know your thoughts and use-cases. I want to have the most 
compelling arguments ready. Not for Dries's sake but for some of the 
skeptics in the Drupal community that need to be convinced. Dries is on 
board and that is a big win...

Cheers,

David Peterson

[1] Drupalcon Szeged
http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/

[2] Drupal
http://drupal.org

[3] Acquia
http://acquia.com/

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 16:36:16 UTC