At the start of this week, Dries Buytaert presented the keynote presentation at DrupalCon 2008 . The most exciting revelation came at the end: Drupal’s future is in the semantic web..

While Dries talks about the semantic web, and RDF, you don’t hear much reaction from the crowd; but then he says Let me show you a video of the future … And proceeds to demonstrate SPARQLing on linked data from sources like dbpedia dbtunes, geodata, events, friends lists, and google spreadsheets, mashed-up in Exhibit.

This gets a lot of applause

In the keynote, he puts emphasis on data interoperability, decentralisation, remote querying, and how having a lot of data is great fun

It’s a really great talk, with a lot of excellent quotes about the value of RDF for Drupal, here are some of my favourites:

Web 3.0 (much as I hate to use the term) is all about infinite interoperability

We have the opportunity to be mentioned in the history books of the web … This is where the web is going. And this right time, and the right place, to make it happen.

Using RDF you can connect all these different parts of data, that live in different parts of the web.

RDF turns the web into a database

The real opportunity we have here is to start sprinkling this map [of linked open data sources] with Drupal. Every single Drupal site can be an RDF repository that people can query

Google are trying to build a world social graph, connecting people … but what we are doing with RDF is connecting not just people, but everything

With RDF, the import/export problem we have in Drupal just goes away. It just works, without having to describe database schemas… It just works. It’s a problem that is already solved.

You can listen to the audio of the presentation at archive.org (~45MB - the RDF stuff starts at around 53 minutes), and view a video of the RDF demonstration

You can also read more about Drupal and RDF here

Share This