DrupalCon DC 2009 - RDF sessions braindump

DrupalCon DC 2009 featured a nice selection of RDF related sessions. 2 regular presentations served as introduction to those who were unfamiliar with the topic, or just wanted to refresh their mind with the latest happenings. Boris Mann presented Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care focused on the practicalities of RDF, in particular the newly standardized RDFa, Open Data and what benefits the semantic web can bring. Using Intelligent Web Services for Semantic Drupal Sites by Frank Febbraro illustrated a use case of RDF with Drupal, built on top of the Open Calais service.

Following up on the 2 presentations, I scheduled 2 BoF sessions to talk in more details about the RDF modules in Drupal. The first one on Thursday started by a round of table where we all introduced ourselves. During/after lunch I went over the RDF CCK and Evoc modules, I showed how to use them and how they easily allow to map existing CCK content models to external vocabularies. Some interesting questions emerged from the demo, some of them related to RDF in general, others asking about the features of the modules. Someone asked about the patch for CCK to enable RDFa with RDF CCK which is now published. I must have forgotten some of the questions, please leave them as comments below (also if I promised you a link!). I was delighted to see so much interest and despite the late notice more than 20 people turned up! On Friday, a second BoF focused on the implementation of RDF in core. I presented my ideas in a few slides as a starter for brainstorming and we continued from there. The idea #1 is basically a simple RDFa annotation in the tpl files, which is not what we want for core - though it might fit some use particular uses cases where you want to create a tpl for each content type. The idea #2 is more flexible and is more what we want for core. Fago suggested to use token since it's under review for being integrated into core. Robert mentioned that all these mappings could be expressed in RDF if Drupal had a way to store its settings as RDF, but this seems like a big undertaking given that the code freeze is now planned for September 1st. That's an idea for Drupal 8 though! Feel free to jump in the RDF core issues on drupal.org, especially the one we discussed during the brainstorming: RDFa: Add semantics from the ground up.

Thanks to all who came and participated in these sessions. I hope you all learnt something and that you'll continue supporting RDF for Drupal 7, whether it's by watching this group, contributing ideas, feedback or use cases. Don't forget to include your name and a short description in the participant wiki page. Keep in mind there is an RDF code sprint to be organized in Galway in May. I will post more information on the dates soon.