Re: Last call for feedback before Drupal 7 alpha release

Good news indeed!

Milton Ponson
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--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Stephane Corlosquet <scorlosquet@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Stephane Corlosquet <scorlosquet@gmail.com>
Subject: Last call for feedback before Drupal 7 alpha release
To: semantic-web@w3.org, "RDFa mailing list" <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>, foaf-dev@lists.foaf-project.org, sioc-dev@googlegroups.com
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 2:46 PM

Hi,

The first alpha release of Drupal 7 will be created next Friday Jan 15th. We've already incorporated most of the feedback we received from the semweb community so far, but I wanted to give the community a last chance to review the RDFa markup and the default RDF mappings we use before it's too late. I should emphasize that all the markup and default RDF mappings that we ship in core will be pretty much set in stone after the stable release of Drupal 7, hence this call for feedback. Site administrators who care about semantics will be able to alter these mappings by installing extra modules, but many people (read several 10K sites) will just install Drupal and not care about the semantics it generates. Therefore we want to make sure the RDFa generated by Drupal out of the box is somewhat correct and does not make folks from the semantic/pedantic web community angry :) - we've tried to keep the semantics as generic as possible for that reason.


== RDF mappings ==

I've created a diagram [1] representing the default semantics of the core data structure and we would appreciate feedback on the RDF terms we've used. This schema was committed last week so if there is any change to be made we should discuss it asap.



== RDFa markup ==

To make the RDFa markup review process easier, I've updated the usual testing site at http://drupalrdf.openspring.net/. It features a blog post [2] with some comments which represents a typical Drupal 7 page annotated with RDFa. Some other pages have been randomly generated in order to test the tracker [3] which acts as a very simple sitemap in RDFa.


Note that the URI for each resource of type node (foaf:Document), comment (sioc:Post), term (skos:Concept) and user (sioc:User) is the same URI as the page which describes it. This has been decided in order to keep things simpler and after careful discussion with some members of the community. Hash URIs for distinguishing thing from the page describing them can be implemented quite easily but this case hasn't emerged in core (but will in the modules people will build and use, and this will be taken care of by a separate helper RDF module).


For those willing to install and try out the software, I've uploaded an unstable version of Drupal 7 core at [4] which includes some of the RDF patches which are still under review [5].

On a slightly different topic, all three RDFa parsers I've used for debugging had each some different RDF output, which I believe are bugs (I've reported most of them). Maybe there is some work to be done in improving these RDFa parsing libraries: Ubiquity RDFa [6], Any23 [7], GetN3 [8] - I feel uneasy when people ask "How can I see the RDFa?" and I can't give them a compelling RDFa parser library which supports 100% of the RDFa markup we output. I've also been unlucky at getting Yahoo! Search Monkey to generate pretty search results from RDFa and I hear this service has been down in the past weeks, which is an unfortunate timing.


Looking forward to your feedback on any of the above! There are several 100K RDFa sites waiting to pop out on the Web, so we should make sure we do it right before it gets too late.

regards,
Stéphane.


[1] http://openspring.net/sites/openspring.net/files/drupal_core_RDFS_v3..5_core.png
[2] http://drupalrdf.openspring.net/blog/2009/10/22/produce-and-consume-linked-data-with-drupal

[3] http://drupalrdf.openspring.net/tracker
[4] http://files.openspring.net/drupal/drupal7-unstable-rdf-20100110.tar.gz

[5] http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?status[]=Open&issue_tags=RDF&version[]=7.x
[6] http://code.google.com/p/ubiquity-rdfa/

[7] http://code.google.com/p/any23/
[8] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/impl/js/