Tag: RDF

Categories
Semantics

A battle of Beliefs: RDF, Natural Language Processing, and the future of the web

Last Week in HTML has been practicing its wicked ways, and pulled a quote from a comment I made to a post at Sam Ruby’s

Ian is wrong. Absolutely, completely, and dead wrong.

…

rather than Ian shouting out “Hurrah!”, he says we must have five different solutions to the five problems, because to do otherwise is to…what? Give up control? Fail to meet the Guinness Book of World Records for largest, most pedantic specification ever derived by man?

At first glance, this seems a repetition of an argument that is growing thin with overuse, but the recent discussions in the RDFa mailing list, about RDFa in HTML5, provides a clear demonstration of the basic disconnect between the parties. Enough so to make it of value to re-visit the discussion, again.

On the one hand, you have RDFa, which is a serialization of RDF, which is a formal data model providing support for a universal form of structured data. On the other hand, you have those whose ideology for the future of the web is based on natural language processing. This is an old, old battle and one we’ve been fighting since RDF was first proposed—prior, really, as I remember working ideological differences between natural language processing, as compared to structured data techniques, in various projects at Boeing in the 1980s.

One would think, then, considering the age of the debate that we wouldn’t fight this old battle in the lists for HTML5. Why? Because it exists above and beyond just HTML5. It is a debate about the fundamental nature of the web, at its most general and profound level, while HTML5 is really nothing more then the next generation of HTML. However, we are fighting this macro battle out in the micro lists of HTML5, but deceptively so.

Those who support RDFa have been continuously asked to provide use cases for RDFa, and have created a wiki page to record these use cases. But each time the use cases are proposed, we’re given a response that the use cases are inadequate, and different sets of criteria for how these use cases can be “improved”. It is frustrating to the RDFa adherents, stumbling about in the dark hoping to hit exactly the right “fit” in order to satisfy these never-ending requests.

In the new thread, though, the underlying ideological differences are peering out through the fabric of technical obfuscation, and we see the real purpose behind the demands for RDFa to justify its existence in HTML5. We’re not being asked to justify RDFa in HTML5; we’re being asked to justify RDF, and beyond that, we’re being asked to justify the concept of structured data. Not just once, but for every instance of a use case.

Ian Hickson writes in one comment in the mailing list thread:

I wouldn’t worry too much about the various solutions in each case — a list of solutions can never be complete, and people will never agree on what consists a pro and a con. What would be useful, though, is an example of how RDFa is expected to solve the problem, e.g. with sample markup showing how the relevant data might be encoded and code snippets showing how the data would then be processed; and a discussion of ways to deal with the likely problems (e.g., for this particular use case: how to deal with authors screwing up and encoding bad data, how to deal with apathy from sites that you want to scrape data from, how to deal with malicious authors encoding misleading data, how to deal with spammers, how to deal with requirements like Amazon’s desire to track per-developer usage, how to enable monetization for producers who are intentionally obfuscating the data today, etc. I expect other use cases will have different problems).

The first set of requests are reasonable and have been demonstrated. I use RDFa in my site to document each post with a formal title, author, date, and set of topics, each of which can be extracted using a PHP API that I’ve installed at my site. I plan on using this data in order to generate my front page eventually. This same data can be extracted with a Firefox toolbar, too, if I’m so inclined, and used to output an RDF document for other’s to consume. The data has also been extracted as part of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey effort, I do believe.

Others have provided examples of the Creative Commons licenses, and FOAF, and other uses of RDF/RDFa. Not only the purpose behind the use but even demonstrations of how the data can be combined across pages. These seem to meet the requests for demonstrating code to both incorporate the RDFa in HTML5, as well as code to pull such data out.

As for authors screwing up and providing bad data, well I have to assume the same mechanisms in place, in the browser, when a person inputs bad data into an alt attribute (if it survives in HTML5) would be in place for bad data in a property attribute. And if the data is coded incorrectly, applications expecting valid RDFa wouldn’t be able to process the data, but that’s little different than applications not being able to process a bad script, or malformed piece of SVG, or even a crappy video file, embedded in the page.

The questions I just responded to are legitimate questions. They serve a purpose, and a person can determine by looking at these questions what needs to be provided to ensure the success of the use case. But then we start getting into murkier territory. Ian asks, how to deal with apathy from sites that you want to scrape data from, how to deal with malicious authors encoding misleading data, how to deal with spammers, how to deal with requirements like Amazon’s desire to track per-developer usage, how to enable monetization for producers who are intentionally obfuscating the data today, …

My god, how do we deal with these on the web today? HTML, itself, fails badly with all of these, so do we give up on HTML? If not, then why are we demanding a state of rigor from RDFa that we’re not willing to apply to HTML5, itself?

If you think this latter set of questions were tongue-in-cheek, perhaps a bit of markup levity, Ian repeats them, later, in the same thread

Do we have reason to believe that it is more likely that we will get authors to widely and reliably include such relations than it is that we will get high quality natural language processing? Why?

How would an RDF/RDFa system deal with people gaming the system?

How would an RDF/RDFa system deal with the problem of the _questions_ being unstructured natural language?

How would an RDF/RDFa system deal with data provided by companies that have no interest in providing the data in RDF or RDFa? (e.g. companies providing data dumps in XML or JSON.)

How would an RDF/RDFa system deal with companies that do not want to provide the data free of charge?

How would an RDF/RDFa system deal with companies that want to track per-developer usage of their data?

One could ask all but the first question about HTML, and not find satisfactory answers. Yet we’re being asked to provide sufficient answers to these questions for a small subset of attributes in HTML5, which would form the basis of support for RDFa. As for the first question, Do we have reason to believe that it is more likely that we will get authors to widely and reliably include such relations than it is that we will get high-quality natural language processing?, this, again, brings us back to a fundamental differences in ideology, natural language processing as compared to structured data, and how can one deal with such profound differences in something like a use case?

To repeat what I said earlier, the issue isn’t about RDFa in HTML5. It is about the existence of structured data on the web. It is the underlying purpose behind RDF. It calls into question a decade’s worth of work, based on the input of hundreds if not thousands of developers and designers. It is questioning the fundamental separation of ideology between the web of the future based on natural language processing and the web of the future based on structured data. But where the structured data folks, those who support RDF, and RDFa, welcome natural language processing as a complementary process, the natural language processing folks seem to see the very existence of structured data woven into web documents to be anathema.

Now, someone tell me how we can break through this wall with use cases?

Dan Brickley chastises those on the RDFa group who see this as a battle, writing

This is not a battle. Battles kill people. It is a dispute amongst technologists who have varying assumptions, backgrounds, collaboration networks and agendas, and who are slowly learning to see each other’s perspective.

Please (and I am very serious here) stop using such bloody metaphors to describe what should be a civil and mutually respectful collaborative process. You will not improve anything if you foster this kind of perspective on our shared problems. Battle talk results in a battle mindset. I do not want to hear any RDFa advocates talking in such terms.

Really, enough with the battle stuff. Go find someone who works on HTML5 and be nice to them, find common ground, try out their tools.

Play nice…try out their tools.

I have tried the tools, and in fact just tried the HTML5 validator with the SVG, MathML, and RDFa (minus Curie) preset, and aside from the fact that it tossed my DOCTYPE, didn’t like my profile attribute, some of my meta elements, and the use of “none” as a value for preserveAspectRatio in my SVG, the validator had no problems with any of my RDFa. I would have to assume, then, that we have seen a demonstration of RDFa in HTML5…and found it good? And lo and behold, the RDFa extractors have also found the same page, and the same use of RDFa, to be good. Hands across the water.

But evidently, not sufficient. What else must we do to play nice? Well, Sam has laid out the “nice filter” in comments to his post that began this particular thread

What would it take for inclusion of the RDFa attributes in HTML 5 to be tracked in the W3C HTML Working Group issues list? Given the links I provided at the top of this post, I’d say that pretty much all of the pieces are in place except for a discussion on the public-html mailing list.

What work would be helpful in getting this to be resolved successfully? Fleshing out the use cases addressing as much of these concerns as are relevant.

How can you help? Join the WG and/or contribute to the wiki.

Just so that it is clear, as we move towards summer I plan to become ruthless in clearing out issues which have been raised but don’t appear to have any substantive proposals or support. There is much good work in HTML5 and it would be positively criminal for it not to advance due to procedural maneuverings. I don’t intend to let that happen either.

And this then leads us back to the questions posed by Ian, above. For each use case, must I then justify RDF? Structured data? Must I give details about how spammers will be vanquished, and evil corporations not allowed to monetize such effort? Must I provide a 12-step program in how to lure the reluctant microformat user into the fold? Does the fact that Virgin Mobile misused the Creative Commons license to publish photos of people without getting model releases, mean that the use of RDF/RDFa to document a Creative Commons license can never be a valid use case? After all, it fails the evil corporate use case requirement being demanded of RDFa.

There seems to exist a gentleman’s agreement in these specification email lists, whereby the participants humor absurd questions such as those proposed by Ian. Well, thank goodness I’m no gentleman.

If the RDFa in HTML5 adherents will be required to provide not only justification for RDFa, but also justification for RDF, as a whole, in addition to a dialog and debate about the fundamental differences between natural language processing and structured data with each and every use case, then I fail to see the “niceness” supposedly in play here. It’s difficult, too, to see exactly what we’re supposed to do to bring about this so-called “common ground”. Ultimately, structured data people see natural language processing as complementary, and that there is room on the web for both ideologies. The natural language processing folks see structured data as competitive, and that the web of the future will be based on one or the other, but not both. How do you work through that kind of difference?

Categories
Semantics

Stop justifying RDF and RDFa

update The discussion on RDFa in HTML5 is quite active on the WhatWG mailing list, and so I’m closing comments down here, and encouraging the discussion in that location. There is no restriction on joining the mailing list. A place to start would be a thread I started but I’m sure new threads will be springing up.

I did want to apologize for assuming that the XHTML errors I had recently were due to WhatWG members having fun at my expense. I’ve had people deliberately break my XHTML-based comments in the past when I’ve written about XHTML, and the break was documented with a screenshot on the website of a WhatWG member. I put 2 and 2 together and came up with 5.

I was reading the back and forth argument about the support for RDFa in HTML5, when it hit me that we, who support RDF, and its embedded serialization technique, RDFa, are going about it all wrong.

The question that gets asked, repeatedly, in the HTML5 and WhatWG mailing lists is What problem does RDFa solve? This typically then leads to lengthy discussions about RDFa versus microformats, how one only needs rel, class, meta, and script in order to seemingly record the same information. Or that marking this information up in any way is unnecessary, as people won’t use it, use it badly or for evil purposes, and the only direction forward for the web is natural language processing…yada, yada, yada—you’ve heard it all before.

But what if we stop focusing on the perceived purpose of RDF/RDFa? What if, instead of defending RDFa as a format for discovery of semantics on the web, in competition with other techniques, we focus on RDF, as others have focused on MathML and SVG—as a rich, mature specification with its own unique purpose, and its own unique benefit? In other words, begin with the assumption that RDF has value in, and of itself, and does not need to be “justified”. Instead, let’s focus on whether HTML5 can support RDF—the rich, mature specification—as is, with the existing HTML5 extension mechanisms.

The quintessential aspect of RDF is the triple of subject, predicate, and object. For simplicity’s sake: the thing, the property of the thing, and the property’s value.

For the most part, the thing is identified by a URI, a Uniform Resource Identifier, in order to distinguish it from every other thing when different instances of data are combined. To repeat the underlying basis of this particular thought experiment, disregard, for the moment, that RDF is used to record semantics. Focus, instead, on the essential structure of RDF data structure. Now ask yourself: can we represent RDF within an HTML5 document, using the HTML5’s current mechanism for extensibility? My assertion in this writing is that the answer is, no.

To demonstrate, let’s look at the RDF/XML output derived from an examination of the RDFa currently embedded in this page. Case in point, the following:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:ns0="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#"
  xmlns:ns1="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
  xmlns:ns2="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">
  <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://realtech.burningbird.net/semantic-web/semantic-markup/oh-look-its-not-just-us-semantic-web-dweebs-who-noticed">
    <ns1:title rdf:parseType="Literal"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" href="/semantic-web/semantic-markup/oh-look-its-not-just-us-semantic-web-dweebs-who-noticed">Oh, look. It's not just us Semantic Web Dweebs who noticed.</a></ns1:title>

    <ns1:subject rdf:parseType="Literal">Semantic Web: <a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" href="/semantic-web/semantic-markup">Semantic Markup</a></ns1:subject>
  </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

The RDFa from which this RDF model was derived is the following:

<div id="node-572" class="node" about="/semantic-web/semantic-markup/oh-look-its-not-just-us-semantic-web-dweebs-who-noticed">
      <h2 class="node-title" property="dc:title">
      <a href="/semantic-web/semantic-markup/oh-look-its-not-just-us-semantic-web-dweebs-who-noticed">Oh, look. It's not just us Semantic Web Dweebs who noticed.</a>
    </h2>          
     <div class="taxonomy">
      Tagged: <ul class="links inline"><li property="dc:subject">Semantic Web: <a href="/semantic-web/semantic-markup">Semantic Markup</a></li></ul>    </div>
...
</div>

The triple we’ll focus on is that a given story (subject), belongs to a particular category of story (predicate), which is this case is “Semantic Markup”.

In the example, the subject is identified with the about attribute attached to the outer div element, which encompasses the actual text of the story. The predicate associated with the subject is identified in the property attribute, which is attached to a list element (li), and the RDF object is the text, “Semantic Markup”, contained within the list item element’s opening and closing tags. The two element attributes used in this example, which are not a part of HTML5, are “about” and “property”. The question then is: can we use HTML5’s current extensibility mechanisms to record the same data, maintaining the same essential structure, in order to derive the same RDF data model when the page is passed to some RDF extraction mechanism?

Goodness knows it would seem to be a simple way to represent the RDF bits in existing HTML5 attributes. For instance, we could add “subject” as another class item and thus eliminate the need for the RDFa property. We already have the link contained within the list item, which would seem to serve the purpose of identifying the object uniquely, and therefore don’t need about. In other words, HTML5’s extension mechanism would seem to be sufficient. Except, of course, it’s not.

If the data so documented existed solely within the page, I could use the class attribute to denote the RDF property, but is the “subject” I use in my document, the same as “subject” in someone else’s document? Who knows. Other than a similarity of text, we have no idea if they mean anything. This is a critical breakdown, too, because precision of data model is also an essential element of RDF. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to combine documents found on the web with any degree of confidence.

However, I suppose we could annotate the “subject” class value with an abbreviation of the domain from which it derives, in this case the Dublin Core domain, or “dc:” for short. By doing so, when you have a dc:subject in your document, and I have a dc:subject in my document, and both documents attach this property to the same subject, then the data can be safely merged. There is no confusion about what each of us “means”, when use use “subject”.

Of course, we’ll then have to negotiate for a shared meaning behind “dc:”. And we’ll have to ensure that everyone in the world uses the same designation for Dublin Core. Then we’ll have to repeat this exercise for every existing and new vocabulary that comes along…

Perhaps the abbreviated designation isn’t as feasible as it would first seem. So, what we’ll do, then, is annotate the subject with the full domain name URI, and still use the class attribute:

<li class="inline node http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/subject">Semantic Markup</li>

Well, that’s going to be interesting to see in our web page documents. Of course, we’ll have to duplicate the domain name URI with every reference to the property, increasing the overall size of the document. And, unfortunately, the dozens, potentially hundreds of RDF parsers that already exist will have to be modified to account for the difference in handling between RDFa embedded in HTML5, and RDFa embedded in XHTML, but that’s a small price to pay for HTML5 compatibility. Really. The RDFa processors will have to look at every use of class in a document, which potentially could slow down processing, and make the applications more sluggish, but that’s also a small price to pay.

Really.

So, we’ve accounted for the predicate, the property in our triple. Next, we need the ability to uniquely identify the resource.

A possible HTML5 attribute we could use is rel attribute, supplying the URI for the subject. However, a quick glance at the HTML5 Wiki for Rel and we can see that, though rel can be str-e-e-e-e-tched almost beyond recognitions, there are limits. Our use of rel as a way of recording a specific URI does not fit within the HTML5 boundaries for permissible uses of the attribute, because it’s not a repeating value that we can define in a table ahead of time.

In our web pages, we can point out our sweethearts, our timesheets, our muse, and a crush. We can’t, however, use rel to point to the resource to which a specific RDF property is attached.

If not the rel, how about others of the HTML5 attributes? For instance, a likely named alternative is the id. Would id work?

Currently, the HTML5 specification supports id to identify a web page element uniquely, but only an element specific to the document and the document’s DOM, or Document Object Model. It’s handy for whizzing the element about the page using JavaScript, and playing pretty, pretty with CSS, but how will it combine with, say, the data from a hundred web pages? A thousand?

Well, it doesn’t combine at all, because the id supported in HTML5 is semantically not the same as the URI necessary for RDF. Though the name of the game in HTML5 is “overloading R us”, in this case the meaning of the term must stretch too much in order to successfully encompass both needs.

So, what is wrong with using a hypertext link to identify a resource? And convincing the HTML5 crew to add “rdf-resource” to “sweetheart” and “muse” in the list of valid rel attribute values?

Ah, now that’s where the rubber meets the road when it comes to RDF. This takes us all the way back to the beginning of the discussions about RDF, and the emphasis placed on the fact that a URI is not the same as a URL. And though a URL is an instance of a URI, not every instance of a URI can be safely used in place of a URL. In other words, we can’t depend on using a hypertext link to identify a resource.

OK, then, what about limiting our RDF to those cases where the URI is a URL?

Unfortunately, this also fails to map cleanly between HTML5 and RDF. In the example, the actual hypertext link associated with the list element with the given property of “dc:subject” isn’t the RDF triple subject, at all. That link is associated with the web page leading to a list of related postings. It’s handy, but it doesn’t uniquely identify the subject being described. No, the actual resource, or subject, is the story, itself.

Now, the story is identified by a hypertext link, but the link in this case isn’t attached in any meaningful way to the element containing our “dc:subject” property attribute. More importantly, from a viewpoint of achieving a clean mapping between the RDF model and bits embedded within the HTML5 document, there is no logic or set of rules within HTML5 to associate the two; not in such a way that we can guarantee the same RDF data model with each iteration of usage within an HTML5 document.

We can assume there’s another link containing the URI within the parent block somewhere that uniquely identifies the resource. There is no formal logic, however, nor set of rules that guarantees we’ll always be able to derive the same RDF model, each and every time.

In other words, the extension mechanisms built into HTML5 can’t ensure that the embedded data can then be used to safely derive and return a consistent RDF model.

RDFa, on the other hand, does define these rules. Defines them well enough that I can make minor modifications to my Drupal template to embed the RDF data, and use a packaged PHP-based API to pull this same RDF data back out. Not just myself—anyone wanting to annotate their web pages with RDF could do so, without negatively impacting on any other aspect of the page, or its consumption by other agents, such as browsers. And any application can then pull the data out using any number of language-based APIs. Unfortunately, though, RDFa does not fit cleanly into the current HTML5 specification. It doesn’t fit, and seemingly, is not welcome.

In the recent discussions related to once again having to “prove” the worthiness of RDF/RDFa, HTML5 lead editor, Ian Hickson, wrote the following in a note posted to one of the HTML working group’s email list.

Also, while the solutions we’re designing will almost certainly still be in use decades from now, and will almost certainly influence the solutions in use centuries from now, we are not actually designing the solutions for the problems seen decades from now.

That is to say, we are trying to solve the problems of today and the next few years, with a design that will be extensible in the future by the maintainers of HTML once they know what the problems of the future are. HTML5 is not the end of the road; when HTML5 is widely deployed and used, then we will be able to design HTML6 on top of it. And so forth.

Thus there is no need for HTML5 to have author-usable features for extensibility to solve the problems of decades from now. The extensibility mechanisms for authors (and HMTL5 has many …) should solve _today’s_ problems; and the language should be designed in such a way that the future maintainers of HTML can later extend the language to fix their problems. This is just how HTML4 was done; it’s how CSS was done; it’s how XML was done (you can’t invent new XML syntax, for instance, that would require a new version of XML).

In this writing, I’ve only looked at the most trivial aspects of the RDF model and its RDFa serialization. If HTML5 fails with something as primitive as a simple RDF triple, it will certainly continue to fail for anything more complex. However, the point on this writing isn’t to highlight the shortcomings of HTML5, as a whole, but to demonstrate that the extension mechanisms within HTML5 are not sophisticated enough to handle existing needs. Not some future extensiblity, as Ian notes, but a need that exists today.

RDF is a rich data model with widespread use, documented by a mature specification, supported by any number of tools in any number of applications, in use by any number of companies, for any number of purposes. It is not some lightweight Johnny-come-lately that can be disregarded and ignored because it doesn’t satisfy a small group’s determination of what is, or is not, essential to the web. We don’t have to justify our interest in RDF, and therefore are fully within our rights to ask that it be supported in any web page markup currently under development by the W3C.

Now, if the HTML5 working group wishes to demonstrate that the RDF model can be implemented in HTML5, as is, then they should do so. They should not, though, demand that we give up the RDF model in order to support some other model, just because they don’t happen to see the need for RDF for themselves.

We in the RDF community are not asking the HTML5 working group to support …extensibility to solve problems of decades from now. We’re asking for a solution to a problem that exists today. Now. This very moment.

Categories
Semantics

Oh look it’s not just us Semantic Web dweebs who noticed

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.

Categories
Semantics

RDFaification of Drupal 6

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.

What simplified my RDFa integration is that my site was already being served up as valid XHTML, via a modification to my page.tpl.php file:

<?php
header("Vary: Accept");
if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xhtml+xml"))
    header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
else
    header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
    "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" 
xml:lang="<?php print $language->language ?>">

The PHP code checks with the user agent accessing the page. If the user agent accepts XHTML, the code returns the pages as XHTML; otherwise, the pages are returned as HTML. However, the DOCTYPE I had been using was a SVG+MathML DOCTYPE, because of my sometimes use of embedded SVG. To validate as XHTML+RDFa, though, you need to use the RDFa DOCTYPE.


<?php
header("Vary: Accept");
if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xhtml+xml"))
    header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
else
    header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" 
   "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" dir="ltr"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<head profile="http://ns.inria.fr/grddl/rdfa/">

The namespaces in the HTML opening tag don’t reflect all that I’ll use in my pages, just the ones I used for RDFa annotation sprinkled, liberally, throughout the page. When I use embedded SVG, I can just add the SVG namespaces directly into the opening SVG element tag. I could add the namespaces now, but I don’t always use embedded SVG.

One unfortunate consequence of switching DOCTYPEs is that when I do use embedded SVG, the page won’t validate. However, this won’t impact on the user agents and their ability to process the SVG correctly, so I’ll just have to live with the invalidation errors. That’s the joy of DOCTYPEs.

Another change is to the opening HEAD tag, where I added the GRDDL profile. This lets data consuming agents know that I’m, first of all, using RDFa, then secondly, using the latest transform profile for RDFa. After all, once the data is provided, we assume someone will want to do something with the data.

I’m ready, now, to begin adding RDFa annotation. Some of the changes I can make directly to the theme pages, such as adding an attribute/value pair of property=”dc:title” to my header element that references my site’s title (“Burningbird’s RealTech”). I also added annotation within the node, via node.tpl.php, again adding property=”dc:title” to each individual site entry’s title.

Other annotation, though, required either the use of a Drupal module, or custom code. For instance, one change I wanted to make was to add a a property=”dc:subject” to my vocabulary terms. In my template.php file (used to override and extend the theme templating engine), I added a taxonomy term function that will not only append the vocabulary to each term, but also annotate the result with the RDFa dc:subject notation:

// split out taxonomy terms by vocabulary
function burningbirds_print_terms($nid) {
     $vocabularies = taxonomy_get_vocabularies();
     $output = '<ul class="links inline">';
     foreach($vocabularies as $vocabulary) {
       if ($vocabularies) {
         $terms = taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary($nid, $vocabulary->vid);
         if ($terms) {
           $links = array();
           $output .= '<li property="dc:subject">' . $vocabulary->name . ': ';
           foreach ($terms as $term) {
             $links[] = l($term->name, taxonomy_term_path($term), array('rel' => 'tag', 'title' => strip_tags($term->description)));
           }
           $output .= implode(', ', $links);
           $output .= '</li>';
         }
       }
     }
     $output .= '</ul>';
     return $output;
}

In the node.tpl.php file, I then replaced the existing print $terms line with a reference to my custom terms display function:

    <div class="taxonomy">
      Tagged: <?php print burningbirds_print_terms($node); ?>
    </div>

Other areas that can be annotated with RDFa in an entry are the author and date, but I didn’t have to code these or modify the theme template directly. Instead, I downloaded and installed the Submitted By module. Once installed and activated, this module provides an “Appearance” field in the content type form, which you can use to modify the “submitted by” line in posts.

By default, the template engine generates a line with the author’s username, linked to their user profile, and the date and time when the entry was created. I modified the field to show the author’s name, without linking to the author profile, since I’m the only author. I also modified the post date to just the date. Time, to me, just isn’t relevant for my site. Adding the appropriate RDFa annotation results in the following pattern:

<span property="dc:creator">[author-name-raw]</span> on [day], <span property="dc:date">[yyyy]-[mm]-[dd]</span>

Now that I’ve annotated several elements in the page with RDFa, I went shopping around at various semantic websites to see what else they were providing by way of semantic markup. At Danny Ayers weblog my Semantic Radar toolbar alerted me to the presence of SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project) data, one of the recommended data types supported by Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. I did a little research and found the SIOC Drupal module, which I downloaded and installed.

The SOIC module automatically generates SIOC, which can be accessed as a direct RDF export. I gather that the module also adds a link to this metadata via the menu system, but I found this only works with a theme like Garland’s. I wanted to be able to integrate a link in the header of my web pages, to page specific SIOC exports, wherever applicable. I checked the module’s documentation, and elsewhere, but couldn’t find anything on automatically adding this link, so decided to add it myself in my theme.

In Drupal, at least 6.x, you can add a preprocess function that will pre-process web page data before the page is displayed. I had such a pre-process function already, to modify my header to a) remove the RSS 2.0 link, and b) modify the content type meta tag to reflect my XHTML content type. It was a simple matter to modify this code to include a conditional check to see if the page being served is the Drupal front page, and if not, whether the page is presenting a node of type story, blog, or user. If the former, I provided a link to the site’s main SIOC export URL; the later, one specific to the node:

function burningbirds_preprocess_page(&$vars) {

  $head = $vars['head'];
  $node = $vars['node'];
  $head = str_replace("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />",
              "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8\" />", $head);
  
  $head = str_replace("<link rel=\"alternate\" type=\"application/rss+xml\" title=\"Burningbird's RealTech RSS\" href=\"http://realtech.burningbird.net/rss.xml\" />\n","",$head);
    
  if (drupal_is_front_page()) {
    $head .= '<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="SIOC" href="http://realtech.burningbird.net/sioc/site" />';
  } else if ($node->type == 'story' || $node->type == 'blog' || $node->type == 'user') {
    $head .= '<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="SIOC" href="http://realtech.burningbird.net/sioc/node/';
    $head .= $node->nid;
    $head .= '" />';
  }

  $vars['head'] = $head;
}

For the node pages, I check to see if the node type is blog, story, or user, as these are the only node types currently supported by the SIOC module. Once this change was in effect, a header link to the SIOC file now appears with the main site page, and with blog, story, and user pages.

This is a start, as I explore other ways to annotate my site with metadata. I also plan on using metadata annotation when I do reviews and other specific types of writing. In addition, I’ll probably add a generic FOAF page, as well as utilize other vocabularies as they present themselves. If you don’t have the Semantic Radar toolbar installed, you can use the W3C RDFa extractor to extract the site’s RDFa. You can see the SIOC by accessing the exporter for the site or an individual entry, such as this story.

Categories
Diversity Semantics

Correlation

noticed a correlation between my last two posts on the lack of women at Ajax Experience and the seeming lack of RDF or semantic web applications. Both are based on perennial questions: Where are the women in technology? Where are the semantic web applications?

Next time I’m asked either, I think I’ll answer that the women in technology are off building RDF-based semantic web applications. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The women in technology are off building RDF-based semantic web applications. It works better than answering yes, there are women in technology but we’re still not as visible as we should be, and yes there are semantic web and RDF-based applications, but they’re still not as visible as they could be—both of which evidently don’t play well in the dominant technical culture, because the same damn questions keep getting asked, again and again.