Any semantic progress?

I'm personally interested to know the state of what currently exists, and the existing models that are being used to integrate RDF stores and SPARQL into Drupal. I have some projects that could put some time, energy, and possibly funding into developing really usable semantic web capabilties for Drupal

What are the existing modules and projects?

Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation

Hi Moshe,

Rest assured development is continuing if not always in immediate public sight. I have a bit too much on my plate just now, but will push the first generally usable snapshots (i.e. 6.x-dev-alpha1) of the RDF API and SPARQL to CVS at the beginning of next week. You can hold me to it ;-)

Ah, ok re-found this discussion http://groups.drupal.org/node/10086

The interesting thing to me is that I have had discussions with quite a few different people in a diverse range of industries and business that are looking specifically for what http://drupal.org/project/sparql and http://drupal.org/project/rdf along with Drupal are apparently moving towards. So, there is actually a pent-up torrent of demand (including funds) that could connect with this development for Drupal, IMO.

This type development also has me re-thinking how to bring data for local based websites like http://arborwiki.org (city wiki sites).

This really changes the model of Drupal from a CMS to a kind of "data canvas".

Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation

3 years of R&D got a fast, close to usable RDF apps that hooked into Drupal. Data can be more flexible and portable. Like the world is round, data is round. Even if people believe it, it's still going to take time for folks to cross the ocean.

Dries slides at DrupcalCon Boston 2008 referenced fans of the Semantic Web as being hooked on crack. Ha ha. Us crazy, futurists, speculative, "earth is round" types.

Anyway, Arto's RDF module in core is great progress, SIOC is a big deal, microformats are gaining strength, and, generally, Drupal is still the best candidate to migrate a popular CMS to RDF land. But, I'd say there hasn't been a lot of progress. Why?

1. Community support - there just isn't a big demand yet. Still waiting for that killer app.
2. Cooperation - competing projects where data standardization is the blocker
3. Funding - yes. money.
4. Drupal data - the way data is organized in Drupal is the best CMS to match RDF. With CCK in core, which will help, but it will take time to further rewrite core systems to be well adapted
5. performance - performant RDF stores don't run on MySQL, and require external systems - often in Java

So, the Semantic Web Front is still just a handful of people, and in speaking just for myself, I can say it isn't adding up yet. Maybe there are new projects I don't know about.

• J

Moshe - BTW, I live in Boston now, and believe I saw you at BarCamp. Going to Ignite Boston tonight.

I think some of the work we have done with the Calais module can be very useful in this regard too. We are working out some of the ideas for new bits of functionality that we would want to include in upcoming releases. Some of those include microformat, eRDF, etc. and would love community input as well.

My GSoC 2008 project is about exporting datasets built using Views in formats like RDF, JSON and XHTML microformats: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11387 The alpha release contains a module for exporting JSON in the Simile/Exhibit format: http://drupal.org/project/views_datasource It will be able to export data as RDF/XML or RDF/N3 using the FOAF SIOC and DOAP vocabularies, so for example a list of forum posts could be exported using the SIOC vocabulary, and also hCard and other microformats so it would be able to export a list of events in hCal with each attendee as an hCard,

Next week we will release a new Semantic Web application built with Drupal. Watch this group!