The last few weeks have been pretty eventful for the semantic web in Drupal.
Lin Clark and I wrote a couple of articles for the IBM developerWorks explaining what it is possible to achieve with Drupal 7 and the recent developments in core and contrib. They are pretty detailed and will be useful materials for newbies willing to learn how to use the Semantic Web technologies in Drupal 7:
- The Semantic Web, Linked Data and Drupal, Part 1: Expose your data using RDF
- The Semantic Web, Linked Data and Drupal, Part 2: Combine linked datasets with Drupal 7 and SPARQL Views
The RDF contributed module for Drupal 7 is now called RDF Extensions and has been moved to a new project namespace: http://drupal.org/project/rdfx. The main reason for this change is some recurring feedback from DrupalCon Chicago and other events where people were confused between the RDF module in core and the RDF module in contrib. From now on, when you hear about the RDF module it will be the core module (enabled by default when you download Drupal 7), and when you hear about RDF Extensions (or RDFx for short), it will be the contributed project. If you were subscribed to the RDF project issues, make sure to subscribe to the new RDF Extensions project issue queue.
I also posted my masters thesis on my blog, with a retrospective on the whole initiative to integrate RDF in Drupal 7 core. It includes a few pages on the design of RDF and RDFa in Drupal 7 core as it was back in 2009 (which is still pretty accurate).
Finally, a code sprint was organized last week-end in Cambridge, where Bryan Hirsch, Alexander Dorsk, Miles Worthington (remote) and myself gathered to work on some of the issues of RDF Extensions, SPARQL and the very promising SPARQL Views project. At the same time, Lin was hacking on SPARQL Views and finding ways to use it with the VIVO project at the VIVO hackathon in Gainesville, Florida.
We’ll try to organize code sprints every now and then (with hopefully earlier notices). In the meantime if you want to give a hand in the issue queues, Lin and I will be happy to help you get started.
