I 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.

The next North American Drupalcon is Drupalcon Boston 2008, coming up March 3rd to March 6th, in Boston. The new combined Raincity team will be attending, although I'll leave it up to later posts to talk about that.

I was asked by the chairs of the site building track to submit a proposal. After a little bit of thinking about what kind of hand waving I might do, I decided to submit my first proposal on Mapping Business Requirements to Drupal Modules - the Gap Fit Process. This is essentially the very first part of any consulting engagement that we go through with clients. What are the requirements, and what modules, themes, and custom code can help match these requirements? I hope to make this a much more transparent process, and share best practices not only on what modules get chosen, but why they get chosen, and teach people how to do better module picking. 'Better' in this case meaning community supported and good quality code.

The second session I've submitted so far is a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session -- RDF and the Semantic Web in Drupal. The infamous Arto has been doing great stuff here, and when I made a post about my rediscovered love for RDF, I got several people contacting me mentioning that they were also doing a bunch of semantic work with Drupal. So, let's figure out where the intersection of Drupal and the Semantic Web is.

Interested in these topics? Sign up at the Drupalcon Boston site and vote for my sessions!