Web 3.0 - Drupal, SPARQL, and RDF

Posted March 19th, 2008 by Webster
in

Drupal has some absolutely sick stuff planned for version 7. Some of their top developers are working on bringing version 7 into the world of web 3.0. So what's web 3.0? Well, 2.0 is interactivity. People can interact on the web. Web 3.0 is interoperability. It allows for the seamless exchange of data. Open ID is a great example of a web 3.0 application that is on the rise.

Drupal, RDF and SPARQL

So what's RDF? RDF is a way to encode knowledge on the web. It allows developers to express concepts like "venus is hot" in code. RDF is the W3C compliant way to encode knowledge.

So what is SPARQL? SPARQL is a query language for RDF. It allows a web site to query other web sites for their data. Basically, RDF and SPARQL is RSS on steroids. No more stodgy parsing. These technologies will create the semantic web we have been waiting for and Drupal is integrating them into the platform. Now, your website will be able to query fields on other websites to build applications.

If you want to see what the RDF uber nerds over at Drupal are cooking up check out their Drupal group. Here you can find their proposal for the introduction of the technology into Drupal 7. To be perfectly honest, I don't understand 3/4 of the stuff they are talking about, but it looks fucking wicked.