Atlantic Linux Blog

Semantic Web enabled Blog

I was at a presentation recently from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) on some of their current work. We do a lot of work with Semantic Web technologies with our partner Profium. Profium’s products use Semantic Web technologies in certain niches such as the news and media industries where the benefits of Semantic Web in managing large amounts of metadata bring clear business advantages.

Outside of such niches, I’ve found it difficult to see where or how Semantic Web technology would be adopted by the mainstream. It was great to see that the folks at DERI have been busy working on just such applications. One of their current projects is the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project which is developing tools which will ultimately allow the islands of information in blogs, forums and mailing lists to be accessed in whatever way a person wishes rather than requiring a person to access each source of information individually. The SIOC project will also make it easier to link information in each of these different media or indeed to mine the information stored in various locations and create your own virtual medium with a user interface of your own creation. I think the area of community software such as forums, blogs and mailing lists is eminently suitable for semantic web technologies – there are massive amounts of information in such islands around the Internet, unfortunately, at the moment it is very difficult to access this information and separate the signal from the noise.

To do my bit for the nascent semantic web I’ve installed SIOC Exporter for WordPress on this blog. This plugin allows any blog using WordPress to export SIOC metadata about the blog. Wahey, Applepie Solutions is on the Semantic Web!

For other bloggers and system administrators who are interested in this, it is a very straightforward WordPress plugin to install – just follow the INSTALL document that comes with the plugin files.
The DERI folks also had a poster session where they demonstrated other practical applications including the Semantic Radar for Firefox extension. This nifty Firefox extension scans each page you open in your browser for Semantic Web metadata (RDF) and flags the presence of such data on a page with a little icon in the status bar. At the moment it only handles a limited number of types of metadata (including SIOC, FOAF and DOAP) but over time this will should expand. It can also ping the Semantic Web Ping Service allowing others to learn about your metadata (and the pages they describe).

It’s good to finally see some maintstream developments in the Semantic Web world .. hopefully this is only the beginning.