Textpattern CMS

#1 2008-12-18 14:15:45

Destry

Member

From: Haut-Rhin

Registered: 2004-08-04

Posts: 4,909

Website

[request] xxx_semantic_web

(“xxx” could be you)

2008 saw a much greater interest in the semantic web than most people realize. While most were being snake charmed by JavaScript libraries, progressive thinkers like Ben Adida were publishing a W3C Recommendation for RDFa. Popular systems like Drupal have announced putting RDFa in the core in the near future. Powerful natural language search tools, like Yahoo’s SearchMonkey (and others) are coming out that feed on semantic metadata. The evolution past center-line web 2.0 will undoubtedly be greatly influenced by semantic information, and the impact this will have for publishers, business owners, and innovators will be tremendous, most likely.

So much for my pitch.

Reuters recently bought a company that drives the open Calais project, which has a very interesting semantic web API than can be implemented as an extension in CMS systems. Apparently what it does is generates semantic metadata on the fly, quietly and quickly. When a semantic crawler (like SearchMonkey, for example) hits the site, it eats it up. (See the Publisher, Blogger, Software Provider, Content Manager, Developer sheets for more info, respectively — and try the semantic document viewer sandbox). It might be interesting for someone to look into this further as it would make semanticizing (just made that up) content easier than doing it manually.

I’m no developer, and I don’t know if this Calais approach or some other is the vector into this, but I do know I’m going more semantic in my own site (manual or otherwise) and this could be a strong Txp asset as more semantic tools and services hit the street and thereafter site owners begin demanding the necessary markup to make them work — and they certainly will.

This is one of those ideas to learn and have fun with, not necessarily fill a need by Monday. :)

Last edited by Destry (2008-12-18 14:30:09)