[TYPO3-dev] The state of support for the Semantic Web / RDFA / Web 3.0 in TYPO3

[Jochen Rau]

Hi Michael.

>> I think we should start the other way around. Let's build Ontologies
>> first and derive the Domain Model from it. And then--what we already
>> plan to do with the new Kickstarter--derive the database tables form the
>> Domain Model. In short
>>
>> Ontology    ->     Domain Model  ->    Entity Relationship Model (OWL/RDF)
>>          (UML)              (relational database model)
>
> I see your point and i am 100% with you Jochen. So what do you suggest as a first sept, i mean second step
> because i think creating a team was be the first.

The first step will be to get Extbase ready ;-). IMO the next steps (in 
parallel) can be:

1. Define the generic domain to be handled by a content management system.

This will define the border of the ontology. And (most important) we 
have to distinguish between the generic domain to be handled (Person, 
Place etc.) and the domain of the cms (Article, Chapter, Author, Page, 
Reference, etc.).

2. Define a best practice implementation to bind objects to the ontology.

How to store the meta information? Because there is a mismatch between 
the ontology and the object oriented programming paradigm. Some things 
can be done by annotation. Some other things can be done 
programmatically inside Factory and Builder Classes (a Person can only 
have one natural Pather and Mother--no discussion about genetics, please 
;-) ).

3. Elaborate on the use cases of semantic content.

I have already published some ideas in a recent post (inspirated by the 
work of the Drupal community):
- Facet browsing (a kind of aspect oriented browsing; see 
http://simile.mit.edu/potluck/ for an example)
- Export rich information (vCard for example)
- Query the content with SPARQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL)
- More intelligent search (mashed up information from many sites)
- and, of course, enriched output generation.

4. Make Semantic Integration a movement of the community.

The whole topic of Semantic Web is not in focus of the community atm. 
This has to change IMHO ;-) (presentations, articles, blog postings, 
T-shirts, give-aways with a small manifesto ;-) )

>> TYPO3 should provide an ontology for the most important objects like
>> "Person", "Event", "Date", "Place", "Product", etc. Of course we should
>> not reinvent the wheel and use existing ontologies if applicable. The
>> output format can be foaf for example.
>
> that is mainly the reason why i stoped working on introducing Semantic in TYPO3 back then

Now the situation has changed. We will (shortly) have Domain-Driven 
Design and Model-View-Controller (Extbase/FLOW3). And TYPO3 v5 will 
support Generic Domain Models (I have already talked to Robert some 
weeks ago). So, please start the engines ;-)

Regards
Jochen


-- 
Every nit picked is a bug fixed