Semantic Web Techonologies in Drupal 7 and why this is huge

At the last Drupal conference in Paris I heard people saying something along these lines: "Drupal 7 will have Semantic Web stuff in it - don't really know why but Dries says it's cool". This was the majority of people.

A small minority, such as John Galvin, where excited about this, even holding it up as the single most important development in Drupal 7. They may well be right.

With tech news in 2009 flooded by Twitter and Facebook shenanigans it would seem that Semantic Web technologies are still the playthings of academics working on the esoterica of description logics.

In 2009, however, Google announced it is working on using semantic web data in search, and Bing makes a point of promoting itself as not just a search engine but a decision engine. Yahoo has been doing this for some time already. These are long term plays that will place the Semantic Web in the center of the new web. And your Drupal site will be ready for it!

So what is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web Activity page states that the Semantic web is about "language for recording how the data relates to real world objects" and about "common formats for the combination of data drawn from diverse sources".

It is those common formats that Drupal 7 is using and embedding RDFa data seamlessly in your website.

What does Drupal do?

The Drupal Semantic Web team headed by scor, did a great job and you get RDFa describing your data effortlessly. If you create something like an Article in Drupal 7 and have a look at the source code you will see snippets of RDFa hidden in divs and innocuous span elements.

Things like:


<div id="node-2" class="node node-article node-promoted node-teaser" typeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document" about="/d7/node/2">


and:


<span class="submitted">
<span datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2009-12-17T01:09:56+01:00" property="dc:date dc:created">Thu, 12/17/2009 - 01:09</span>
—
<span rel="sioc:has_creator">
<span class="username" property="foaf:name" typeof="sioc:User" about="/d7/user/1">ronald</span>
</span>
</span>


Data like this can then be used to reason about the contents of a page, who produced it, and what they are talking about. This reasoning can then lead to all sorts of conclusions and use cases.

Drupal 7 lays down the infrastructure, the groundwork for this. There is still a lot to do but now innovation can take place at a much quicker pace and will be directly by functionality right in core.

So why is this huge?

While Google and Bing are clearly moving in the Semantic Web direction, for things to really take off they actually need lots of semantic data to feed on.

Tim Berners-Lee has been asking everyone to just fill the place up with RDFa for years now - saying that the use cases would develop.

Well Drupal is about to do this in a big way. Just one more of the multiple ways Drupal gives you a better website while you enjoy life ;-)

More Info

Check out the following blog posts for some further info:
Status of RDF in Drupal (November 09) and wrap up of ISWC2009
Produce And Consume Linked Data With Drupal!
Dries Buytaert - Drupal, the semantic web and search
Potential RDF use cases for Drupal
Drupal and the opportunity of RDF
Liam Green-Hughes - Drupal 7 and the Semantic Web connection