I have mostly been away from the Semantic Web (SW) development since Drupal 7. Now that I look at the state of the SW tools in Drupal 8, it seems to have tapered off somewhat. There is the EasyRDF library that has been put into core, which is a positive. But I don't see much use of it in core or in other modules or in the D8 examples (although there was a start at https://www.drupal.org/node/2102705). From what I can tell from the examples at the EasyRDF site (http://www.easyrdf.org/examples), it seems that EasyRDF will perform queries of outside Triplestores, but it does not have a database itself.
So it would seem that to have more robust and easy to use SW technologies in D8, it would be preferable to have a PHP only Triplestore that could be easily integrated in the vendor modules of D8 itself. The likely candidate for a Triplestore in this case would be the ARC2 Triplestore (https://github.com/semsol/arc2 and D7 module at https://www.drupal.org/project/arc2_store). So the question is, would anyone anyone be interested in helping to port the ARC2 D7 module to D8, and/or develop some kind of Triplestore as a set of vendor modules in D8? It has been pointed out many times that there is much potential with the SW, and Drupal could continue to develop that potential with its great history in this area along with market share, momentum, ease of use, etc.
My primary use case that I have in mind right now is how this might be used for a faceted directory. It seems to be a great match for such a use case and has been documented in many academic papers (e.g., do a search on "faceted ontology").
Please let me know any thoughts or interest that you might have concerning the Semantic Web and/or work on using a faceted ontology for a directory in Drupal 8.
Comments
The post got my attention at
The post got my attention at least enough to raise a couple of concerns. The first one is that building a directory and hoping people will use it seems less productive than meeting use case and building out from there. The second is that whilst a php library which can store the triples in Mysql (or all the databases that D8 supports, possibly including MongoDB?) has obvious attractions, the data will be locked behind the Arc 2, a php 5.3 library which does not look very active. Whoever ports the module will then be drawn into supporting Arc 2, and ensuring it works on php 7.
Erfurt SWF a better alternative for Drupal 8
@John_B - Thanks for the feedback. I found another PHP project that has a triple store and seems to be kept up pretty well. It is Erfurt SWF, and is supported by a research group in Germany - http://erfurt-framework.org/ or https://github.com/AKSW/Erfurt. It appears to have originally been based on RAP (https://groups.drupal.org/node/10044), but has since expanded significantly it seems. So if any PHP triple store were to have a Drupal 8 module for it, then it would seem that would be the better candidate.
That being said, I have also realized that for a straightforward directory with facets then just using Views with the Better Exposed Filters is a pretty good solution. But that will only go so far, so I am still investigating this issue a bit more.
a straightforward directory
Yes, done that.
Also you can use Solr to search in a granular way, for exmple to search just taxonomy vocabularies, though it is a bit more complex.
I am not convinced about the need for a mysql backend. To me that makes sense for a stand-alone Drupal 7 site. I tend to look on Drupal 8 as a large enterprise application whose natural environment is interacting with other software, such as Apache Jena. Anyway, the use case one starts with gives a steer on architecture.
I am interested and can help
I am interested and can help with extending the current SW capabilities for Drupal8
BeautifulMind
Awesome!
@beautifulmind - Great that you have an interest in extending the current SW capabilities for Drupal 8. Can you elaborate on any thoughts that you have to go forward with this - what areas you think need improvement and what approaches you think would be best for these?
So far in my investigations, I am wondering if interfacing to the Erfurt project might be the best way to go. See these sites:
http://aksw.org/Projects/Erfurt.html
https://github.com/AKSW/Erfurt
It can use PHP and MySQL for the Triple Store and interfaces, but can also interface to other larger Triple Stores if any given project grows bigger. I have not gotten a chance to play around with it yet but on paper it would seem a promising match for interfacing to the EasyRDF that is built into D8.