We're half way through the sprint and we just heard that Google has announced support for RDFa. What a coincidence, surely another sign proving Drupal's heading in the right direction! Now is time for some update on the sprint.

During day 1, we decided to split the group into two in order to enable some parallel developement and to make use of the 2 main skills we had at hand: RDF semantics and Drupal coding.

Our users can communicate with one another, which is great, but quite often as an administrator the need may arise for us to communicate with a user or users on our site. It may be to remind them about the web site or to inform active users about new changes to the site, which they may not have been made aware of.
This article is extracted from the "Drupal 6 Social Networking" book. In this article, you will learn:

• About mailing lists, and how to use them with our Drupal social network
• How to use an offline approach for contacting our users
• How to use blocks of content to get a message across to your users

"RDFa in Drupal: Bringing Cheese to the Web of Data" is the title of our short paper which was recently accepted at the 5th Workshop on Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web. It seems that the topic of food on the semantic web is the new black as this paper comes out at the same time as Boris Mann's announcement about the Open Restaurants aka "BaconPatioBeer".

This paper illustrates how a CMS like Drupal can be used on the Semantic Web and make every Drupal site part of the growing Web of Data. We created a cheese review site as a use case. It relies on the RDF API and the RDF CCK modules.

The good news is that we are working to get this RDF goodness into Drupal core! We are organizing an RDF code sprint. This sprint builds on Dries' ideas expressed in his recent posts Drupal, the semantic web and search and RDFa and Drupal. With RDF in the core of Drupal and RDFa output by default, it's dozens of thousands of websites which will all of a sudden start publishing their data as RDF.

So far, Stéphane Corlosquet, Florian Loretan, Benjamin Melançon and Rolf Guescini have signed up. How about you?

Some others are willing to come but cannot afford the trip until some funding is secured. To help us fund the sprint and bring more Drupal rockstars on board, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. The money will be used to cover flight, food and hotel costs for the sprinters. All sprinters are generously donating their time to make this happen. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive testing and Fields experience. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or will be donated to the Drupal Association.

There are only a few months left before the code freeze on September 1st. Now that Fields API has settled in core, it's time to extend it with some RDF semantics. DERI Galway is hosting an RDF in Drupal code sprint during the week of May 11th until May 15th.

Goals of the code sprint

The RDF code sprint will focus on Drupal core and aim at integrating RDF semantics in it.

1. Extend Fields API to integrate RDF mappings for each field instance. The semantics of a field can differ from a bundle to another. This can be stored either in the existing settings property or by adding a rdf_mappings property to the Field Instance objects.
2. Modify the Fields UI (contrib) to allow RDF mappings editing.
3. Define the appropriate mappings for the core modules, based on the RDF core mapping proposal.
4. Patch core modules with the mappings defined above.
5. Export these mappings in RDFa via the theme layer and keep it as generic as possible in order to ease the work of the themers.
6. Write tests for RDF in core.
7. Identify other non-fieldable entities in core which could benefit from being RDF-ized, and see how to annotate them. Comment is one example. Terms also, though they might become fieldable.
8. RSS 1 (RDF) in core. Arto volunteered to get started with that.

During my 5 week stay in the US, I was based at the Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing where I worked on the Drupal based Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) project with Tim Clark, Sudeshna Das and Benjamin Melançon.

This is the video which was presented during DrupalCon DC 2009 at the Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care session.

The next Drupal Ireland event is taking place on Saturday 4th & Sunday 5th April in the DERI building at NUI, Galway and will run from 10am to 5pm both days. Registration is free and you can now sign-up for this event.

Cormac Staunton has created a great audio clip for announcing the event. It's scheduled to air today on FlirtFM.

Exciting times for the Semantic Web in Drupal...

Harvard IIC and SCF

Today is my first day at Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing where I'll work on the Drupal based Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) project with Tim Clark, Sudeshna Das and Benjamin Melançon. I had the chance to meet Tim last year when he visited DERI and presented the SCF project. We'll work on aligning the efforts which were put into SCF with the efforts of the Drupal community in terms of RDF. We will see what requirements are emerging from a project such as SCF and contribute them back to the Drupal community.

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.