[Zope-dev] RDF Use cases
Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters <mj@digicool.com>
Fri, 17 Dec 1999 21:55:11 +0100
Hello Zopatistas,
Digital Creations is in the process of extending the Zope
architecture towards new emerging standards, and a new interface
based on Mozilla. See:
http://www.digicool.com/News/mozilla
http://www.zope.org/Resources/Mozilla
One of these standards is RDF, the Resource Description Format. This
is a foundation for processing metadata and for interoperability.
With it, you can describe content and content relationships, rate
content, define the structure of a website, and much, much more. All
this in a machine readable format. More information about RDF can be
found at the W3 Consortium website:
http://www.w3c.com/Metadata/RDF
Before we dive in and start writing code, however, DC will first try
and define what we are up against. One thing we do, is define Use
Cases. Use Cases describe ways in which people would use RDF. A few
examples:
- RDF Sitemaps. The browser of visitor of a Zope generated website
can retrieve a RDF Sitemap of the website, for presentation to the
visitor. For a preliminary specification of RDF Sitemaps, see:
http://rudolf.opensource.ac.uk/about/specs/sitemap.html
- Content syndication. A website administrator makes some of its
content available via a RDF datasource.
- Metadata embedded in HTML. HTML pages returned from Zope have
embedded in their header an RDF description of the document,
including information on author, language, publisher, etc. This
could be based on the Dublin Core metadata proposal.
- Advanced management of Zope objects. When describing the
contents of a ZODB database in RDF, RDF clients like Mozilla can
query and manipulate these contents with alternate interfaces.
This is your opportunity to help in this process. We want to know
from you all what your ideas are for using RDF in Zope. Nothing is
too crazy or inventive!
Let me know what you can come up with.
--
Best regards,
Martijn Pieters mailto:mj@digicool.com