Archive for March, 2008
Towards the Semantic Web Friday, March 7th, 2008 by Matt
Imagine a world where much of the data that’s flowing around the net takes on meaning, thereby becoming knowledge. Imagine a world where a system in Germany can infer that I’m the uncle of Wade, based on data from a system in the US indicating that my brother Page is the father of Wade. Imagine a world where an online product review from Steve is displayed for me ahead of the other 500 reviews, because of inferred trust derived from the knowledge that both Steve and I happen to share a common friend, you.
Although we’re still a long way off, recent events — in which MakaluMedia staff have played an important part — have brought us a few steps closer to such a world.
MakaluMedia hacker and researcher Arto Bendiken has long been interested in distributed systems, and “information about information”, and naturally developed an interest in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF, in short, is a technology that allows the representation of data as “knowledge”. If two independent systems store their data in RDF, and share common semantic “vocabularies”, then the two systems can effectively share their “knowledge”. What does RDF look like? A simple example has been taken from this Quick Introduction to RDF.
@prefix : <http://www.example.org/> . :john a :Person . :john :hasMother :susan . :john :hasFather :richard . :richard :hasBrother :luke .
As it happens, our Drupal team, led by Arto, has been working for a few years on a project with our colleagues at M.C. Dean and Raincity Studios in the development of a sophisticated collaboration and communication platforms for the US government, based on the Drupal platform. (Certainly it represents one of the largest and most complex Drupal instances in the world.) This platform presently supports more than 60 international clients servicing use cases ranging from policy definition collaboration, to natural crisis management, to school operations in the African continent.
This project represents a natural fit for RDF technology, given the value realized in sharing “knowledge”, not just “data”, between the various instances of the platform, as well as the growing number of other RDF-enabled systems around the world. Towards this end, the project team has been working intensively during the past months to design, develop and begin to integrate an RDF storage, management and access framework into Drupal. And since a primary objective of this project is to release the developed products as freely available open-source software, much of this RDF work can be tracked and accessed from the Drupal RDF project page.
Given that Drupal forms the core technology of the platform , the project team naturally maintains a close relationship with the its founder and leader, Dries Buytaert. In guiding the evolution of the Drupal platform, Dries has always demonstrated a willingness to take bold steps in the direction of progress, and this has been evidenced once again this week. In his keynote speech at the Drupalcon Boston 2008 conference, Dries made the big announcement that the future versions of Drupal (beginning with version seven), will be based on RDF.
Drupal presently dominates the market of open-source content management systems, and so this announcement represents a huge step forward to the building of a truly “Semantic Web”. If interested, you can read various reactions from the blogosphere at Network World and SitePoint.
We are tremendously proud to have been a part of this progress, and look forward to continuing work towards a world of networked knowledge.