Dries Buytaert

Semantic web and Drupal video

Two years ago at DrupalCon Boston, I declared that we should embrace the semantic web, and that, as a first step, we should add RDFa support to Drupal core. Since then, I've written extensively about the importance of semantic technologies in Drupal, and how I believe Drupal can play an important role in helping to bootstrap the semantic web.

Drupal 7, the next major release of Drupal, will ship with RDFa support directly "out of the box." To help people understand what is possible with RDFa support and how it enables us to do cool new things, take a look at the video below. I showed this video in my DrupalCon San Francisco keynote, two years after my initial RDFa challenge at DrupalCon Boston.

There are many other things we can build on top of this core support, but this is a start. I'm personally very excited to see this vision being realized, and I'm very thankful to all the people that helped make this possible. Kudos to Lin Clark from DERI, NUI Galway for her work on building the demo and recording the screencast, and to Stéphane Corlosquet from MIND Informatics at Mass General for leading the RDF in Drupal 7 efforts. The newly launched Semantic Drupal website contains articles, video tutorials and news on building Linked Data sites with Drupal 7.

— Dries Buytaert