I am getting ready to submit a paper about using Drupal as a Semantic Electronic Lab Notebook (more info at mylabbook.org). One of our graduate students asked for more visuals after he read an earlier version of the paper and it started me thinking about the Semantic Web "Layer Cake". And so I came up with this visual for how Drupal might stack up against the SW Layer Cake. This is just a first pass at this match-up, so no doubt I am missing some aspects to the picture. But I would be interested in any feedback about how accurate or inaccurate this is, i.e., what is missing or should not be there. Also, I would be interested in people's thoughts about whether implementation of the of the SW Layer Cake by Drupal is actually desirable (or feasible) in all of its aspects. For example, is it desirable or feasible to implement a reasoner in Drupal (the Unifying Logic piece), or would that best be done through web services to, say, the FACT++ reasoner. Also what about probabilistic reasoners (even though not a W3C standard).
One more thing. From the Drupal homepage, Dries has a link to fill out a survey about the future of Drupal. In many of the list of top things about Drupal, no-one mentions the Semantic Web features (RDF, SPARQL), and, indeed, there is nothing specifically in any of the survey questions relating to Semantic Web features. But the potential is there (as everyone in this group probably knows). So if you think it is a good thing to expand the SemWeb capabilities for Drupal, it might be good to pass that on in the survey as well (there is a section at the end about general comments as well as text boxes for specific input throughout the survey).
Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.
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