4 September 2004

Semantic government

Paul Ford has begun a series of articles chronicling his conversion of Congress' Web site into semantic Web content. It's a quick read with clean, complete examples detailing his process and with clear insights into a Web guru's approach to this difficult task. It's a labor of interest more than usefulness: he wants to prove to himself and others the benefits of the semantic Web, and he knows that his solution (a hack based on screen-scraping) can easily go out-of-date. Nevertheless, the process is facinating.

His goal, with the semantic Web, is to create documents that automatically expose their semantic content. The keywords on Messages from the Ether are a more manual attempt at that. At any page within this site, I want to be able to get to all pages that discuss similar topics. Maintaining the keywords is minor effort (a few quick HTML templates to fill out plus deciding what words are important), but it would be more transparent and complete if I used semantic triples. I'm just not that cutting-edge.

[ posted by sstrader on 4 September 2004 at 6:00:23 PM in Programming ]