[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