Jeff Finkelstein, Customer Paradigm wrote:
Martin-
I agree that the .htaccess file is a big stumbling block for many people
with low-cost hosting. Would a lightweight php-based application that could
write to the .htaccess / create the RDF file work to solve this easily?
Sorry, it won't. The issue is actual access to the .htaccess file. Thus,
you have to move the metadata expressed in RDF into the (X)HTML docs
that are being published based on the existing .htaccess config.
Even when the above is done, you will need RDFa processors within user
agents (or standalone) for the Linked Data deployment to fully materialize.
Kingsley
Thanks,
-- Jeff
________________________________________
Jeff Finkelstein
303.499.9318 x 8282
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.customerparadigm.com
Customer Paradigm
5353 Manhattan Circle, Suite 103
Boulder, Colorado 80303
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-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Martin Hepp (UniBW)
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:44 AM
To: Danny Ayers
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; semantic-web at W3C
Subject: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re:
RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation
Hi all:
After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata for their
businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1], I have quite some evidence
that the current best practices of using .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck
for the adoption of Semantic Web technology.
Just some data:
- We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people spend
10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of themselves.
- Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 % of
them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root directory.
- Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation
properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe.
The effects are
- URIs that are not dereferencable,
- incorrect media types and
and other problems.
When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we encountered a
variety of configurations and causes that we did not expect. It turned out
that helping people just managing this tiny step of publishing Semantic Web
data would turn into a full-time job for 1 - 2 administrators.
Typical causes of problems are
- Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give limited
or no access to .htaccess)
- Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it begins
with a dot
- Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes
- Many users have access just at a CMS level
Bottomline:
- For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an Apache
server so that it serves RDF content according to current best practices.
- For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a prohibitively
difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a variety in the
technical environments that turns into an engineering challenge what is easy
on the textbook-level.
As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates "dummy"
RDFa code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data without
interfering with the presentation layer.
That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any XHTML
document.
Any opinions?
Best
Martin
[1] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
Danny Ayers wrote:
Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill.
Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format
you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the
single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the
alternate representations for conneg.
As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for
RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good choice
for typical Web applications.
As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly,
though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present.
Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the
surface area of the data.
But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish data
directly without needing the human element to interpret it.
I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few years
before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real
benefit for the end user.
my 2 cents.
Cheers,
Danny.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
e-mail: [email protected]
phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype: mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp
Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
========================================================================
Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
Tool for registering your business:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
Project page and resources for developers:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
Tutorial materials:
Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on
Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
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--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
