SIOC

This week we had Dan Brickley visiting DERI. Dan co-started the FOAF project in 2000, and is also involved in the SIOC project which is mainly based here in DERI. That was the occasion to have several sessions of brainstorming about various aspects of SIOC including dataportability (John presented his slides), the recent change in the Dublin Core ontology, URIs and best practices for publishing SIOC data, and finally some domain modifications (some of them came from the Drupal RDF Schema I've been working on). This lead to a few changes on the ontology. A digest of these sessions is being written.

While he was in Galway, Dan expressed an interest in Drupal, which is already used on sioc-project.org. We had a few opportunities to meet and I demoed him the flexibility of this great tool. Laura joined us for a bit, and I thought it could be useful to share this, so below is the rundown of what we did in a few hours.

I gave my talk at DrupalCon Barcelona on Friday to an audience of about 50 people. I presented some concepts of the Semantic Web and how they are applied in the case of online communities with the SIOC technology. The slides are available for download. I got interesting feedbacks during the presentation, such as Fen Labalme from Civicactions who strongly recommended to avoid using FOAF and to use more secure and privacy friendly technologies such as XRI.

Figures are always better than several pages of text. Here we see several people being connected by the content they create online. (Credit: John Breslin)

I also gave a quick demo of a prototype drupal site querying a SPARQL endpoint such as dbpedia.org. More people came at the end of the session to greet me, they obviously liked the presentation and the opportunities that the Semantic Web can offer. People were so enthusiastic that we had to continue our conversations outside, and I missed the first half of the next talk! But it was great to see so a great response from the community! Also, thanks to Peter aka Greenman for organizing this session at the first place.

The next day, Jonathan Hendler was talking about the Semantic Search module he created for Drupal.

After some technical difficulties to set up the computer and the video, he went through a short explanation of what RDF means. Someone asked when the Semantic Web would hit us, Jonathan replied that "the Semantic Web already hit us, we just missed it". The audience was quite RDF savvy already, so he quickly moved on to more technical details. The LINC - Leveraging Investments in Creativity site is an online demo of the Semantic Search tool running on a drupal site. He also showed the administration pages which allow you to specify which RDF store you want to use. His module can run on Sesame and on YARS. Jonathan was glad when I announced that YARS2 came out recently and that it was now supporting SPARQL!

Again, some people expressed their interest after the talk, and we decided to move to the BoF room, in order to brainstorm about Drupal and the Semantic Web.