Drupal growth, semantically tested

2008-03-11T10:43:49-05:00

The RDF initiative for Drupal 7 announced by Dries last week at DrupalCon Boston 2008 has been getting a lot of interesting attention. (Check out the video mashup demo.) Today Danny Ayers points to an email on the w3c list, by Arto Bendiken in a thread "Drupal 7 to be a major linked data client" where he summarizes quite well this initiative and how the Drupal community can be aided in this endeavor.

Until recently, there have been perhaps a dozen Drupal developers actively working at the intersection of Drupal and RDF-based technologies - these consist pretty much of the various authors of the modules I listed in my earlier e-mail (which Danny forwarded to this list).

Now, Dries Buytaert's endorsement last week [1] of RDF as a key technology in the upcoming next Drupal version (7.0) has generated a lot of buzz in the Drupal community, and as a result a much larger bunch of Drupal developers are in the process of looking into and learning about RDF and SPARQL - some of them for the first time, others with eyes already clouded by previous sentiment from the early days of RDF....

...Dries's endorsement came at an opportune time, and the consortium I represent [6] collaborated with Dries to produce the 5-minute "video from the future" mashup demonstration [7] for his keynote presentation at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

--

[1] http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/0...
[6] http://groups.drupal.org/node/9010
[7] http://groups.drupal.org/node/9363

I have to say that this demo was quite impressive. Arto's email provides a nicely concise rundown of the challenges, some myths, and action items for the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group.

For our part, we're very excited to see Drupal pushing forward so quickly into the semantic web and the potentials offered by things such as this RDF initiative. We're big believers in semantic mark-up and microformats. Al Steffen's contributed theme Hunchbaque offers themers and developers a nice starting point.

Arto points out that the biggest challenge will be the learning curve for people new to RDF:

On this front we will need to overcome prevailing RDF myths, some the most prevalent ones (off the top of my head) being related to "lack of widespread adoption", "lack of performance/scalability", "too much complexity", and so on. In other words, things that may have been true once upon a time but more likely than not have been put to rest since then.

In addition, there is the matter of the syntax versus semantics issue - that is, people still insist on comparing XML and RDF as if they weren't apples to oranges, and yet others have persisted in imagining RDF as merely an early version of RSS, now supposed to be dead and trampled over by the Atom bandwagon. There is clearly much unlearning and re-education work to be done on these matters; but I would guess SWEO members have heard these concerns previously.

If this is all new to you, I encourage you to read last week's nice summary by Ian Davis:

Web 3G is what happens when you fuse the social participation of Web 2.0 with the decentralized structured information of the Semantic Web. The result is a smarter way of organising information in a network of interwoven semantic links and content, enhanced with feedback from usage and participation. We're coming up to the end of two decades of the Web, the first of which was spent seeding the bare essentials of the web of documents. The second decade saw widespread broadband adoption enable mass participation and creation of content by millions. The next decade is going to radically change how we find, create, use and relate to that information.

The Web right now is built from the generic hyperlink, which says nothing more than "look over here". But even this weak semantic was enough to enable Google's Pagerank to organise and score the Web. Imagine how much more powerful the hyperlink could be if it were possible to express sentiment or meaning in the link. Even if that were limited to positive or negative endorsement of the target of the link, the value to the relevance ranking of search engines and applications would be huge. However, the possibilities for expressing the intention of a link between two pages are endless. For example, it could be possible for writers to say whether they support or reject the views expressed in the target of the link, or whether they are linking to conflicting evidence or alternative versions of the same information. These simple expressions of intention could provide an entirely new dimension of metadata. The links between things are fundamental to the existence of the Web and the value of understanding why things are related is huge.

[Update: See also the ESW Wiki for some very helpful links.]

No doubt there's a lot to be learned, discovered, hashed out and developed....

...And tested. As of last Friday at the Drupal code sprint, our own Kevin Bridges is now involved in developing a continual unit testing framework for Drupal 6 and 7; and Greg Hines has joined the JavaScript testing effort.

Drupal has entered the enterprise realm without leaving behind the sound principles of an open internet and the core values of open source. And Drupal is getting better, and helping lead the web into its future of being whatever it becomes.

Quick and dirty XMLRPC Clients for testing

2007-08-21T19:15:27-05:00

Hey folks. I'm a new hire here at the pingVision ranch, and so I've not had a lot to say, but some of my esteemed colleagues suggested I share this tidbit.

I recently had to create a small, simple xmlrpc service in a Drupal project. That involves hook_xmlrpc, which is very well documented and is pretty darn easy to use. However, for testing purposes I needed to throw together a simple page to hit my service and display what it found. After a little googling, I found this page: http://keithdevens.com/software/xmlrpc.

If you download the source he's sharing there, then you can set up a simple xml client like so:

require_once 'source.php';
define("XMLRPC_DEBUG", 1);
XMLRPC_request('time.xmlrpc.com', '/RPC2', 'currentTime.getCurrentTime', NULL, NULL);
print_r($result);

XMLRPC_debug_print(); ?>

This works very well - the first parameter is the host you're going to, the second is the path - for hook_xmlrpc in Drupal it's going to be either '/xmlrpc.php' or the like - the third parameter is the method name, the fourth is an array of parameters for the method, and the last is some sort of user_agent, which I don't currently understand the purpose of. (Apparently it's the browser you're querying from, or something like that - as far as I can see, leaving it NULL is fine.)

Naturally the print_r($result) gives you the result on the screen, but the XMLRPC_debug_print() function additionally gives you a lot of debugging information for your rpc call - the xml you sent, the xml you received, and another view of the data that XMLRPC_request returned.

I hope that's helpful to folks out there, and I look forward to learning more about Drupal's many interesting features.