[GSoC proposal] Extend microdata support to contrib field types

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colette's picture

Project information

Project page: http://drupal.org/project/microdata
Student: Anca Dumitrache (colette)
Mentor: Lin Clark (linclark)

Description

Microdata is a way of marking up HTML so that parts of a page can be reused across different sites and services. It has gained widespread adoption due to Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s use of it for their Schema.org initiative. Drupal has been recognized as a leader in using microdata for practical applications, and articles on the topic have been published in IBM’s developerWorks.

In order to get proper microdata output for Drupal’s fields, each field type needs to be modified to support microdata configuration and the field formatter needs to be modified to place microdata output.

This project will add support for microdata to field types in contrib. Between 20-40 of the most used field types will be selected. I will work directly with module maintainers to assess their interest in adding microdata support to their module, and will also work with maintainers to ensure that patches are to their standards and get committed.

Project Schedule

  • first 2 weeks + bonding: first patch
  • 3-5 modules patched / week - until midterm
  • post-midterm: testing as part of the patches, refine tests, work with module developers to make sure the patches get committed

Who am I?

I am a first year Master's student of Artificial Intelligence at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I specialize in Knowledge Technology and Intelligent Internet Applications. In my spare time, I work in the KR&R group as a student assistant.

My research interests are web development, particularly in the field of semantic web, knowledge representation, and big data processing. I began working with Drupal as part of my Bachelor’s thesis project, where I employed Drupal’s RDF and semantic web related modules to deploy a web resource on cultural heritage.

How will the community gain?

This project would increase the support for microdata in fields defined in contrib modules, increasing the reusability of Drupal data. This will allow for more data to be shared with Google’s Rich Snippets using the Schema.org vocabulary, and will also give site builders more flexibility to create decentralized systems as described in the IBM article.

Comments

I met Anca when she interned

linclark's picture

I met Anca when she interned with my research group at DERI in 2010 (back when I was a GSOC student). I encouraged her to apply this year both because she's very sharp and also because she has the kind of fun, nerdy spirit that thrives in this community.

I think that this project will give her a good introduction to the community. It only requires knowledge of a few APIs (the Entity Property API, field formatters, and Simpletests), so the learning curve is manageable within the GSOC timeframe, but because she'll be using those APIs across a range of field modules, she'll get a broad view of Drupal's contrib space. She will also get a chance to interact in the issue queues with many of the most active Drupal contributors.

Google Summer of Code 2012

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