RDFa and Taxonomy Integration
Hi,
I've seen a lot of people talking about adding RDFa to CCK fields. It looks like this solution is well on the way of being realized. However, I have not seen much reference to using RDFa with taxonomy terms. My guess is that poses more challenges. Nonetheless, being able to RDFa-ize terms would be very cool. Has anybody here given this any thought? My guess is that a good place to start would be the Content Taxonomy module. If the RDF CCK module integrated with Content Taxonomy, this might be a reality. I believe that combining RDFa and tags would translate into a first class example of the possibilities of semantic web. I'm curious what others here think about this topic. Cheers. kevinthe
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Hi @iteego, You have a good
Hi @iteego,
You have a good question. A couple of years ago (in 2006 to 2007) I did much research (and an undergraduate BSc(Hons) project) on "Adding Semantics to Social Web Tagging Systems", which looked into using RDF and RDFa across sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us.... now that the social web is a lot more active, and a lot easier thanks to things like Wordpress, Joomla and of course Drupal, I think we'll be coming across some of these challenges.
In terms of an RDFa representation of a tags, that is probably as simple as using something like MOAT (Meaning of a Tag: http://moat-project.org/ ). But if you actually want to build up a structured taxonomy (or an ontology) within Drupal, then thats something a little more complex - and one can envisage a module that ends up looking a little like Protege ( http://protege.stanford.edu/ ). These two methods are external tagging and internal taxonomies/tagging - respectively.
I think it'll be incredibly useful to have both internal and external tagging systems, and combined we can use them with some funky SPARQL queries.
Those are my thoughts. I'm just getting to know my way around Drupal (at varying levels of technological depths) at my new job, but I am quite a SemWeb expert (as well as a Social Webber).... so I'll be willing to give my thoughts/advice when needed. Plus this is also my first post on the Drupal Groups ;-)
Thanks and Blessings,
Daniel
Hi Daniel, I will take a
Hi Daniel,
I will take a look at the projects you suggested. Thanks for that. Actually, what I was envisioning (and think sounds logical) is somehow associating a fixed vocabulary (ontology, not drupal) property to every term in Drupal. Whenever that term is printed as output, the term is wrapped with the appropriate RDFa snippet. This could work in a number of ways. The coolest way I envision it working would be simply having the RDFa property field on the term EDIT form the same way we have it currently for content types with RDF and the RDF CCK modules. Cheers, Kevin
Another solution would be
Another solution would be via the Content Taxonomy module CCK fields exactly as RDF CCK already does.
@danieljohnlewis. I checked
@danieljohnlewis.
I checked out MOAT, interesting project but I don't like the external tagging idea. I'm interested in an internal, automated system that uses a complex ontology. Actually, I'm currently building that ontology with the protege tool. However, the protege project as a whole is much more complex than what I'm looking for. They enable you to build the ontology, data capture forms and query the data. I just need to be able to define the meaning of a tag with RDFa using any ontology. Very much along the lines of what RDF CCK already does for CCK fields. Cheers. K
These are great ideas of
These are great ideas of course, but right now there is more energy going in Drupal 7, since it'll hopefully have RDFa capabilities in core, which will make this kind of integration easier. RDFa in D6 means patching modules (or getting some patches committed) and we're working on making this available out of the box in the next version of Drupal. See the list of patches at http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=RDF, and in particular Convert taxonomy_node_* related code to use field API + upgrade path: if we manage to have Fields on taxonomy terms, we could reuse a lot of the code existing for Fields and RDF.
Patches for D7 and D6 contrib are always welcome of course.
Drupal 7 sounds like its
Drupal 7 sounds like its going to be excellent. Unfortunately, converting current web applications over to Drupal 7 will likely be a slow process for those with large sites and lots of modules in use. Considering that, Drupal 7 is not the panacea for people stuck with D6 for awhile but are excited about experimenting with semantic web possibilities now. So I was curious what options we have with D6? I'm also curious if anybody here has looked much the content taxonomy module as it does seem to be one that may be relatively painless to integrate with RDFa CCK. I'm wondering, if this would in fact make it possible to accomplish this solution.