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Semantic Web Categories

  • Big SW, Little sw

    Issues related to Semantic Web, the theory, as compared to semantic web, the practice

  • General

    General and misc. discussions related to the semantic web

  • Microformats

    Writings related to microformats, including tags

  • RDF

    Resource Description Framework

  • Semantic Markup

    Writings related to the use of semantic markup

Writings on the Semantic Web

  • Oh, look. It's not just us Semantic Web Dweebs who noticed.
    01/06/2009 - 13:36
    Semantic Markup

    A List Apart has a new article out on the Semantics in HTML5. John Allsopp writes

    We’ll start by posing the question: “why are we inventing these new elements?” A reasonable answer would be: “because HTML lacks semantic richness, and by adding these elements, we increase the semantic richness of HTML—that can’t be bad, can it?”

    By adding these elements, we are addressing the need for greater semantic capability in HTML, but only within a narrow scope. No matter how many elements we bolt on, we will always think of more semantic goodness to add to HTML. And so, having added as many new elements as we like, we still won’t have solved the problem. We don’t need to add specific terms to the vocabulary of HTML, we need to add a mechanism that allows semantic richness to be added to a document as required. In technical terms, we need to make HTML extensible. HTML 5 proposes no mechanism for extensibility.

    On reading of which, I hurt my head by banging it, suddenly and with force, against my desk.

    Several times.

  • Why are all those states dark blue?
    11/11/2008 - 18:11
    Big SW, Little sw

    Now this is damn clever: using Google searches to trend flu outbreaks. Google is aggregating flu-related searches into trending where flu outbreaks might be occurring, or about to occur.

    So far, knock on wood, the flu trend graph shows low activity for Missouri.

  • RDFaification of Drupal 6
    11/11/2008 - 11:58
    Semantic Markup

    You don't have to wait for Drupal 7 to RDFaificate your Drupal site. I spent yesterday tweaking my space, and if you access the site now with a tool, such as the Semantic Radar Firefox add-on, you'll see all sorts of semantic goodness. I used a combination of plug-ins and theme modifications to make my changes, and will probably add to the overall effect over time.

    Read through for the gory details...

  • Incorporating RDFa, SIOC, FOAF
    11/10/2008 - 09:37
    General

    Expect breakage...incorporating bunches of stuff...

  • RDFaification of Drupal
    11/08/2008 - 20:39
    RDF

    Don't you love it when people take bits and pieces of different words, creating a new word that manages, somehow, to be understandable? A word like RDFaification?

    But the RDFa beautification of Drupal is upon us, helped along by writings such as A Roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7, based, in part, on this previous post and discussion, kicked off by Drupal's Dries Buytaert.

    Years ago, we used to talk about the "ugly" serialization of RDF (RDF/XML at the time) and how the serialization technique really didn't matter, because one day, the metadata annotation of a site would be handled automatically via whatever content management tool people used.

    Future, meet Drupal.