The emergence of RDF for Drupal 6, and first public details of some long time clients
BlogI am so excited to finally start sharing some public information about some long time clients.
It was at the very first Drupalcon in Antwerp / FOSDEM 2005 (see the 2008 organizing page) that we met Ivan Labra* and Chris Rynearson**, started handing out the Drupal koolaid.
3 years later, Arto Bendiken writes about the potential use cases for RDF in Drupal and starts lifting the covers on some of the core components that this relationship has helped fund (mine and walkah's multi-year focus on OpenID as one example). Here's are some excerpts from Arto's post:
Our platform is currently based on Drupal 4.7.x, and is probably one of the most complex Drupal systems around: we're making use of over 130 contributed modules and have a total code base size of nearly 600 KLOC (not a point of pride). Moving onwards to Drupal 6.x, our goal is to radically simplify the system by standardizing on RDF to allow for more precise expression and efficient sharing of information, and to utilize Exhibit as the central technology driving the user interface.
Some of the rest of the acronym salad in this project includes LDAP, IMAP, and XMPP. There is an advanced webmail client that has been contributed, and a great web-based XMPP client built on jQuery is in progress as well.
In case you hadn't guessed, this is an enterprise scale system with many components. It runs close to 100 instances, all of which are built to be completely self sustaining, but can additionally interoperate between each other as well. Additionally, one of the program requirements is that every component be completely open source, so it can easily be transferred or replicated anywhere. And Drupal is at the heart of it all, being used as a content router, aggregator, visualization layer, and user/group facilitator.
As the whole module stack moves to Drupal 6 and RDF gets baked into a lot of pieces, this will start enabling cross-site data mashups without having to pre-aggregate a bunch of the data.
I'm helping to facilitate an RDF and Semantic Web Birds of a Feather session at the upcoming Drupalcon Boston, so please join me there to learn more, or just go ahead and start diving into the code that is already available in Drupal CVS at http://drupal.org/project/rdf.
*Ivan is handwaver extraordinaire (yes, more than me), and I'm sure members of the Drupal community will recall his pontificating from past events.
**Chris is probably best known for being the #1 or #2 poster on del.icio.us (almost 34K links!) and taking great pictures.
