Semantic Web and Drupal

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…