Semantic Camp Session 6 – Parsing Microformats
Gareth Rushgrove
Gareth gave us a quick rundown of the various parsers which are available.
Language Specific – most available apart from Java.
Language agnostic – web services
hKit – open source PHP stuff.
Mofo – for Ruby
Sumo Javascript (from Dan Webb) – generic parser for JS.
XSLT – at Brian Suda’s site
Optimus – is down at the moment
Google’s Social Graph API – parses XFN relationships
Semantic Camp Session 7 – WTF is RDF?
Tom Morris
Always worth hearing, Tom did an idiots’ guide to RDF, just the thing for a bear of very little brain such as myself.
RDF = Resource Description Framework! 1999 originally, 2004 updated into 6 docs:
RDF files at their simplest form:
3 things – subject, predicate, object (see above). The simplest form is – Triples (N3)
Subject and Predicate are Resources – Not literals; Object – Literal sting of text
foo.n3 – text file containing triples.
Tools to parse are available in – Java, C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby
He then talked some more about RDF validation and FOAF – which seems like the most friendly and usable aspect of RDF from this bear’s perspective. If you want to make your own FOAF file, why not use the foaf-o-matic
The Rest of the Afternoon
There were other talks going on, but I got distracted by a rather fab game, made by John Linklater-Johnson called Semantopoly. A fab idea [not in the least based on Monopoly] which had us all amused for some hours:
[Matt, Gareth and Isabelle get to grips with the rules of Semantopoly]
