Rdfa News & Articles

The W3C (news, site) has been busy. They've released seven documents related to HTML, one of which is of interest to anyone working with HTML and another to anyone involved with the semantic web.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

You can't afford to ignore the issue of Digital Asset Management, or DAM. It's more than a fun acronym. Solid DAM can make your business more efficient. Poor DAM can result in waste, confusion and many lost opportunities.

Researchers with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have thrown themselves head over heels into the semantic web. At this year's 8th International Semantic Web Conference, they presented a paper (download the PDF) focused on the problem of automatically generating the metadata that many semantic web functionalities rely on. 

Talking about RDF closures can cause eyelids to flutter, but the RPI folks aren't living in some theoretical world. They've been digging hard into large, public data sets and have learned some important lessons about making data more useful. Come join us for a closer look.

Without complex decision trees helping computers determine what pieces of text relate to what, it's nearly impossible to make use of the wealth of data available on the web.

In the case where you're only interested in people reading your pages, that's fine. But what if you want other sites to access and use the data you're offering with a full understanding of the context? We're one step closer to a standard that defines exactly how to make this clear.

For months now we've been talking about RDFa and how this proposed standard leads toward the semantic web. Recently, this vision took a step further toward reality.

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.

As we've discussed before, the semantic web is supposed to help with issues where computers just have no idea of what they're seeing in any context. The problem was getting people to take advantage of this technology in any real numbers.

Well, if you care about Search Engine Optimization (and who doesn't?) then it's time to wake up and smell the semantics. Otherwise, your search results will plummet as SEO gold goes to those who take advantage of Google's new tool: the Rich Snippet.

And Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) seems to agree completely.

The World Wide Web Consortium's OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview." Go ahead. Grab a dictionary. We'll wait.

This document is the first in an exciting thirteen volume escapade through the syntaxes, sub-languages, along with other details behind OWL 2 and its differences from OWL 1.

In the march toward creating the semantic web, web content management systems such as Drupal (news, site) and many proprietary vendors struggle with the goal of emitting structured information that other sites and tools can usefully consume. There's a balance to be struck between human and machine utility, not to mention simplicity of instrumentation.

With RDFa (see W3C proposal),  software and web developers have the specification they need to know how to structure data in order to lend meaning both to machines and to humans, all in a single file. And from what we've seen recently, the Drupal community is making the best of it.

Good news for sites pushing product: Mediasurface, a provider of web content management solutions, is joining forces with hybris, an e-commerce provider, to give clients an e-commerce web solution with the strength of a full-blown CMS backing it.

Sweet!

Last month we reported that Open Text’s data integration strategy rested on the shoulders of the Genio product, a technology they bought alongside the Hummingbird takeover in ‘06.

Now we get to see the finished article with the official release of Genio v7. This 64-bit information management application transforms, cleanses and directs structured and unstructured content from a range of repositories.

Featuring web service support and full content integration capabilities, Genio laughs in the face of incompatible system interfaces and proceeds to process content and digital assets from data marts, ERP systems, mainframe systems, CRM, and so on. (And, of course, from various content management frameworks.)