Harvard IIC and SCF

The first Irish Drupal meetup happened in Galway in January 07. Since then, Alan and myself have tried to convinced the Drupal users based in Dublin to get together and organize a Drupal event in Dublin. It was great to have this happen last Saturday with such a high number of attendees: 74 people! Thanks to Stella and Heather for all the marketing work!

All sorts of people came out to the event: folks from Google, IBM, Ericsson, some civil servants, many students from the various Dublin universities and freelance developers. We even had people visiting from the UK. Some were experts in PHP or other languages and were interested in learning about Drupal itself in order to contribute their expertise in coding and security. Some others were keen on creating new ties with the Open Source world in general. The gender ratio was better balanced than the regular 10% that we have come to expect at Drupal events.

Following up on the interest of the Drupal Semantic Web group, I'll present my ideas on the Semantic Web which will be an update of the talk I gave in Barcelona. I will also present a project which I co-started a few months ago: Neologism.

This week we had Dan Brickley visiting DERI. Dan co-started the FOAF project in 2000, and is also involved in the SIOC project which is mainly based here in DERI. That was the occasion to have several sessions of brainstorming about various aspects of SIOC including dataportability (John presented his slides), the recent change in the Dublin Core ontology, URIs and best practices for publishing SIOC data, and finally some domain modifications (some of them came from the Drupal RDF Schema I've been working on). This lead to a few changes on the ontology. A digest of these sessions is being written.

While he was in Galway, Dan expressed an interest in Drupal, which is already used on sioc-project.org. We had a few opportunities to meet and I demoed him the flexibility of this great tool. Laura joined us for a bit, and I thought it could be useful to share this, so below is the rundown of what we did in a few hours.

As a semantic web researcher and developer, my goal is to bring these technologies to the lay people. The main problem is the common chicken and egg dilemma, where the semantic web technologies need semantic data to become truly useful and powerful, but nobody wants to produce such data until they can see how powerful the semantic web is.

There is an immense amount of data available on the internet spread over millions of HTML pages, PDF documents, et cetera. These formats have been designed for making these documents understandable for people, but not for machines. In this instance RDF comes in as a language to describe data and relationships within the data. From a web of documents we evolve to a web of pieces of data, i.e. concepts, items, ideas, events, people, you name it. Each of them can be identified by their own Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the web becomes a global database.

Finally! After much work during the last months, 4 betas and 4 release candidates, it's now official! Drupal 6 is out! It ships with a revamped easy to use installer, a new drag and drop interface, OpenID out of the box, improved Internationalization, and an Update Status module which will help you to keep your site and modules up to date. Also for the developers, new APIs have been integrated in core such as Schema API and Batch API. You can find more details about all the other new features of Drupal 6 in the announcement.

Whether you're a beginner in Linux or an advanced user, the installfest organized next Saturday 17th by the local LUG will definitely be of great interest to you! Come along with or without your machine, at DERI, Dangan - see map - from 10am to 1pm.

Living in a totally drupalized world for 4 days is something I had never experienced before: drupalCon Barcelona 2007 was my first DrupalCon, and it was a really amazing and enriching experience.

Venue: citilab, an old factory newly refurbished, which looks really modern and well designed. I really like the wood color inside the building, which gives it a natural warm and enjoyable atmosphere. We were actually used as guinea pigs: Drupalcon was the first conference in this venue, and it was a success!

Day 1

The event introduction by Bert was really fun and entertaining. Picktek room - the main room - was packed with the 400+ attendees, many people had to remain standing.

I gave my talk at DrupalCon Barcelona on Friday to an audience of about 50 people. I presented some concepts of the Semantic Web and how they are applied in the case of online communities with the SIOC technology. The slides are available for download. I got interesting feedbacks during the presentation, such as Fen Labalme from Civicactions who strongly recommended to avoid using FOAF and to use more secure and privacy friendly technologies such as XRI.

Figures are always better than several pages of text. Here we see several people being connected by the content they create online. (Credit: John Breslin)

I also gave a quick demo of a prototype drupal site querying a SPARQL endpoint such as dbpedia.org. More people came at the end of the session to greet me, they obviously liked the presentation and the opportunities that the Semantic Web can offer. People were so enthusiastic that we had to continue our conversations outside, and I missed the first half of the next talk! But it was great to see so a great response from the community! Also, thanks to Peter aka Greenman for organizing this session at the first place.

The next day, Jonathan Hendler was talking about the Semantic Search module he created for Drupal.

After some technical difficulties to set up the computer and the video, he went through a short explanation of what RDF means. Someone asked when the Semantic Web would hit us, Jonathan replied that "the Semantic Web already hit us, we just missed it". The audience was quite RDF savvy already, so he quickly moved on to more technical details. The LINC - Leveraging Investments in Creativity site is an online demo of the Semantic Search tool running on a drupal site. He also showed the administration pages which allow you to specify which RDF store you want to use. His module can run on Sesame and on YARS. Jonathan was glad when I announced that YARS2 came out recently and that it was now supporting SPARQL!

Again, some people expressed their interest after the talk, and we decided to move to the BoF room, in order to brainstorm about Drupal and the Semantic Web.