Future Wave Web Technology Blog

RDF is a W3C stan­dard for mod­el­ing and shar­ing dis­trib­uted knowl­edge based on a decen­tral­ized open-world assump­tion. Any knowl­edge about any­thing can be decom­posed into triples (3-tuples) con­sist­ing of sub­ject, pred­i­cate, and object; essen­tially, RDF is the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor for exchang­ing data between systems.

This mod­ule pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive RDF func­tion­al­ity and inter­op­er­abil­ity for the Drupal 6.x plat­form. For more infor­ma­tion, read the intro­duc­tory post­ing or watch the demo video. Be sure to sub­scribe to the Semantic Web group on groups.drupal.org to keep up with the lat­est happenings.

The mod­ule requires PHP 5.2 or newer, makes use of the ARC2 library if avail­able, and will inte­grate with the Views, FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, Location, and Services mod­ules if they are installed. For adding SPARQL query sup­port, see the related SPARQL project.

Projects that rely on this mod­ule as a depen­dency include Calais, File Framework, FeedAPI RDF and the Relations and DAV APIs and their spin-offs such as File Relations Server.

This project is being devel­oped by Arto Bendiken, Miglius Alaburda, Ben Lavender, Jeff Miccolis, Frank Febbraro and Stéphane Corlosquet. Development has been in part spon­sored by OpenBand and MakaluMedia.

Downloads

Recommended releases

Version	Downloads	Date	Links
6.x-1.0-alpha7	Download (63.71 KB)	2009-Mar-25	Notes

Development releases

Version	Downloads	Date	Links
6.x-1.x-dev	Download (66.22 KB)	2010-Jul-11	Notes

• View all releases

Resources

• Home page
• Read doc­u­men­ta­tion
• Try out a demonstration
• Look at screenshots
• View usage statistics
• View project translations

Development

• View pend­ing patches
• Browse the CVS repository
• View CVS messages
• Report a secu­rity issue

This is the future of the web. Companies, orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als who take advan­tage of these tech­nolo­gies will be more com­pet­i­tive and be able to take advan­tage of the ben­e­fits. RDF is part of the seman­tic web. Semantics is about mean­ing. I’ve been writ­ing about how most con­tent on the web is not setup in a way that has mean­ing that can be under­stood by web agents, by machines, com­puter, the soft­ware that makes up the web. So, web ser­vices, in most cases, until they imple­ment these changes, have no idea what the mean­ing is con­tained in the con­tent, the data on the web.

As I men­tioned in another post, we can take google and how it does a search. We might ask a ques­tion of google but it is just look­ing for the key­words in the ques­tion mean. With the seman­tic web which is being slowly imple­mented by Google and moreso by Yahoo, the search engine will under­stand the phrases we use — the lan­guage we use, the mean­ing in our ques­tions. So, if you have a search that includes the word apple, it will look at the con­text and know whether you are talk­ing about a fruit or the soft­ware com­pany. This usu­ally isn’t a prob­lem because other words (key­words) in our search usu­ally help to increase the like­li­hood that we will find some­thing related to what we are search­ing. We won’t get a site that has infor­ma­tion about the fruit if we search for apple soft­ware. Those two words help tar­get the results.

This did become a prob­lem prob­lem recently for me when I was look­ing for a place called Digsby. I got page after page about the social chat appli­ca­tion (it does more than chat/IM). I tried to tell my search engine, not to give me results that have any­thing to do with soft­ware, or com­put­ers… it did not work. The seman­tic web would help with this.