Drupal 7 and the Semantic Web connection | greenhughes.com

Description

The Semantic Web is the concept that you can add machine readable meaning to you website to make it easier for computers as well as humans to understand what is going on with your content. If you look at this page you will find it easy to tell which part of the page is blog content, where my name is etc., but for a machine this is not so easy, they will only see something like “bla bla bla TITLE bla bla bla” and often will be limited to trying to find content based on keywords. The whole Semantic Web idea is the subject of major research efforts and much debate over how far it can go, but the good news for Drupal site administrators and readers of their websites is that Drupal 7 will be offering support for some of this technology out of the box.

I have to admit I am no expert on the Semantic Web and am just starting to get my head around it. The extent to which it can be a success is a bit of a hotly contested one with some arguing that that trying to classify the information in a web site and expecting authors to stop and mark sections that contain such meaning is unrealistic. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be an all or nothing situation though and travelling a little way down the Semantic Web path could have some major advantages. Back in February 2009 a roadmap was drawn up to get some of this technology into Drupal core and the other day I got curious and decided to download a development copy of Drupal 7 to see some of these ideas in action.

In October 2008 Dries Buytaert the founder of the Drupal project first raised the idea ...

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