Dear members of the Semantic Web & Views development,
I have been playing with the idea of using Drupal as rapid development environment for (semantic) web applications, rather than CMS. The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem at first:
- CCK allows me to define a database model. Core functionality in D7.
- Feeds parser lets me to pre-fill the data in nodes defined in step 1 - including the possibility to fetch data at regular intervals, update nodes and drop old nodes.
- RDF-related functionality allows me to associate the data saved in pre-defined nodes with ontology terms.
- Views allow mixing of data from different node types
- It is also possible to programatically define data (e.g. automatically fill in a field) both in the node and in the View
- Finally, there are plenty of modules that let me do just about anything with the data once I have it in nodes & views. Some exampels include e.g. visualization on a map, and setting up a web server (SOAP, REST, ...) that exposes my data to the outside world.
My experiments were partially with D6 and partially with D7, mainly because some of the modules I wanted to try do not exist in D7 version (yet).
The main issue I have is with feeding the data from view to a node. Lin Clark has explained how to do this with SPARQL Views => PHP array => Feeds => nodes workflow, but this unfortunately only works with some obscure alpha version of feeds for D6. I am sure it is possible to expose view data as e.g. RDF feed, and then fill in the nodes using e.g. Xpath or Querypath Views parser, but this appears quite ineficcient to me. Since nodes are the main Drupal data type ("entities" in D7?), not being able to save data to nodes is really annoying.
What bothers me is that this (view => node) seems like a very elementary and often needed functionality to me - so why isn't it implemented? Am I missing something obvious, such as "hey buddy, nodes aren't needed at all, jou can do it all with views", or "there is a simple & working way to store view content in nodes"?
Secondary issue is with foreign keys (node references) that I need to link two node types in a view => in D6 at least I wasn't able to get this working automatically with Feeds, but it's quite easy to calculate the nid of the foreign key at node generation time, so this is a minor issue. It would be even better if I could link two node types in a view using a common taxonomy term, or even better using the RDF tags associated with node fields in addition to node references.
thx in advance for all ideas & suggestions. If this is a FAQ, I would be quite happy to RFD, but I didn't not find anything in this direction so far...
cheers
Denis