Challenge? Using RDF in "real" surroundings

Hi all,

A friend of mine, who is website developer at a large educational 
institution, recently contacted me with a problem, and the 
question if RDF could help him out.

The situation is as follows: they have a large website describing 
the institution and the different courses that you can follow 
there. The site is reasonably easy HTML so normal keyword search 
engines (like Google) have relatively little trouble with it.

However, he would like to add more metadata to the domain, and 
specifically, he wants to be able to:

- "inherit" the metadata description from the more general pages
   to the more specific ones.
- annotate more specifically: which page is the parent of which
   other page, whether a printable version of a page exists,
   pointing to indexes, etc.

Now, my first reaction was that most of this is possible in RDF, 
but the next question then becomes: How? For the specific 
annotations, I would think an ontology is necessary. Is there an 
ontology out there that is used for the purposes described above? 
What kind of tools would you expect to be helpful for him? Also: 
what would the tangible benefits of doing this be for him and the 
institution? He is pursuing this out of an interest in easier 
maintenance and better navigation possibilities, can we help? 
Adding the metadata is one thing, but is there something out 
there which will make use of it?

I realize the problem is rather vaguely described, but the reason 
  I post it here is that I think it is a real challenge to see 
not only whether we as a community can come up with some ideas on 
how to tackle this problem using RDF-based solutions, but if the 
things RDF can do right now are compatible with the things people 
like my friend seem to expect of it... One more thing I should 
point out is that he doesn't expect this to be a very heavy 
development project (they come in shapes and sizes of course, but 
he has limited resources).

Now, I don't expect you to do his homework for him, but some 
insights would be appreciated :)

Regards,

Jeen
-- 
jeen.broekstra@aidministrator.nl
aidministrator nederland bv - http://www.aidministrator.nl/
julianaplein 14b, 3817 cs amersfoort, the netherlands
tel. +31-(0)33-4659987, fax. +31-(0)33-4659987

Received on Thursday, 20 June 2002 06:41:05 UTC