So, I obtained a copy of the book, ‘Semantic Web for Dummies.’ Not that I consider myself a semantic web “dummy,” but I feel like I am constantly in need of simple, clear and concise paradigms within which to explain, conceive of and think about the so-called semantic web or Web 3.0. I find that if I can easily explain to someone else, preferable a “layperson,” what promise standards like RDFa and OWL hold, then it might actually have a chance of working, taking hold and finally changing the web of documents into a web of data.
Thus far, I’ve only read the introduction but am hope to see concrete examples of “how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web” (from the Amazon.com description). I will post again once I’m into the book a little and can make a decision on whether to recommend it or not.
Interestingly, the book comes with an insert advertising the site Semantic Universe. I had discovered this site sometime last month. Seems like a great/useful site. It was a double-find for me as it’s a site about Semantic Web AND it’s a Drupal site!
Semantic Web and Drupal
April 28, 2009
A huge bonus to choosing Drupal as our new CMS (or CMF – Conent Management Framework, which better describes, it seems, Drupal’s abilities) is the attention being paid by the Drupal community to interoperability with semantic web standards such as RDF/RDFa. The Semantic Web Drupal Group is active in this area:
“This group was started at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. It includes discussions on how to integrate the Semantic Web into Drupal and list the various effort of the community towards enabling RDF in Drupal.” (from their site)
This seems to me a logical way for semantic web technologies (RDFa, OWL, etc.) to enjoy more widespread adoption on the web – to integrate their “deployment” into already existing systems such as Drupal. For someone like me, who is overseeing the migration of 80-odd websites into Drupal and would like these site to be semantic web-ready, a CMS-level integration of these standards makes the task less daunting. After all, it really should be the case that one simply enables semantic web technologies for one’s site thereby exposing the data and making the web a much richer place. In other words, I still “believe” in the semantic web as first laid out by Tim Berners-Lee in his 2001 paper and think we’ve come a long way toward the idea of a web of data/linked data. Initiatives like Drupal’s Semantic Web Group just make it easier TO believe…
