Drapetomaniac

We had the first day of VoCamp in Austin today, hosted by Semantic Web Austin.  It’s the first VoCamp in the United States and the largest one so far from what we were told.

Several of us wanted an intro to the concepts behind the vocabulary concept for semantic web.  I had read the primers and even encouraged others to move towards Microformats and more semantic web habits.  Not ever having done a full continuous implementation (mostly fits and starts) we needed an overview to make sure we were starting from a good place.  I did find a more recent site with good information about RDF and via discussion, we actually created a sort of vocabulary for the semantic web.

Some of the conversations over pizza helps solidify the concepts in everyone’s mind.  We had a good session from Phase2 Technology showing off Open Calais (an open web service and set of tools that accepts your content and provides rdf semantics back.  The Drupal distribution Pase 2 created, Open Publish, was easy to use and provided a lot of SEO friendly semantic options on displaying your articles.  It stores the original rdf returned by Open Calais and offers it via a <link> but allows you to control the tags, external links (video and photo links) and other returns you might not agree with or like.

One of the depressing things I came across surveying the field of CMS tools for the semantic web was that Wordpress and Drupal almost consistently have offerings while Joomla (my chosen CMS for production) seems to have nothing available.

Since this blog is in Wordpress, though (I finally left mephisto), I was pleased to find the tool Zemanta (which plugs into Firefox and interfaces with many blog interfaces).