RDFa, SearchMonkey, Drupal (and SIOC)

It’s been an exciting week in terms of developments and announcements for the Semantic Web and search.

Firstly, Yahoo! SearchMonkey has published a list of recommended vocabularies for developers of SearchMonkey applications, including FOAF, SIOC, DC, vCard, vCalendar, hReview, GoodRelations, dbPedia and Freebase. SIOC is recommended for “blogs, discussion forums, Q&A sites”. See the video below for a nice overview of SearchMonkey.

Secondly, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert wrote a very interesting and encouraging post yesterday entitled “Drupal, the semantic web and search” in which he says:

“On a social networking site built with Drupal, [semantic technology] opens up the possibility to do all sorts of deep social searches – searching by types and levels of relationships while simultaneously filtering by other criteria. I was talking with David Peterson the other day about this, and if Drupal core supported FOAF and SIOC out of the box, you could search within your network of friends or colleagues. This would be a fundamentally new way to take advantage of your network or significantly increase the relevance of certain searches. I can has semweb in Drupal core?”

Thirdly, RDFa just became a W3C recommendation! Congratulations to all involved…

Edit: Fourthly, the Creative Commons Network has been launched. CC CTO Nathan Yergler said:

“The CC Network is where the semantic rubber meets the web road. With the CC Network we’re leveraging everything we’ve learned over the past five years about metadata on the web, including the new RDFa standard, along with the work of many other groups, including FOAF, POWDER, and SIOC.”

Oh, and finally, SIOC is now OWL-DL compliant. This change was motivated by the SWANSIOC initiative in the W3C HLCSIG (Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group), which uses the Science Collaboration Framework based on Drupal.