Just a short background, Rasmus Lerdorf is the creator of PHP and still continues as a core developer to the PHP project.
RDF, Semantic Web and the Monkey
RDF in Drupal. Rasmus made a special point of highlighting the importance of embedding structured metadata into the page. RDFa allows you to embed data into your web pages and also lets you create custom vocabularies, or even better, reuse existing vocabularies. Why would you want to do this? Searchmonkey will go out and index this content and open up a rich search API to allow you to do intelligent queries. Well beyond what is possible with traditional search.
Along with rich search you also get enhanced search results. I have blogged about this previously so take a look. It is really cool stuff and I will be discussing it in much more detail over the course of the conference.
Pitching the Semantic WebWhat if all Drupal sites had embedded RDFa tags? Well, for one, Yahoo would be very happy. It would play directly into the strengths of Yahoo’s new Semantic Web strategy. They are trying to do interesting things with semantic data but of course they need data — the classic chicken and egg thing.
Rasmus mentioned that Yahoo’s semantic data store can scale to the size of the web so the invitation is open.
The future of DrupalThis is where my focus at Drupalcon is, driving the adoption of semantic technologies within Drupal — I feel that the momentum here will make that a reality. There is a lot of interest, a Semantic Web BoF session was stacked with people with some cool ideas…