Re: Challenge? Using RDF in "real" surroundings

Hi,

concerning the general problem you could take a look at all the people 
who use ontologies and metadata
in order to construct and maintain websites, e.g.

projects:
    Araneus
    Strudel
    Seal
    Cohse
and others

people
    Crampes + Ranwez

(search at http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/)

concerning the inheritance: just use some reasoning engine

Steffen

Jeen Broekstra wrote:

>
>
> 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

Received on Thursday, 20 June 2002 08:05:26 UTC