Dave Beckett

Semantic weblogs++

2004-05-29 18:17

I have just made some updates to my Semantic Weblogs page with a few new people, mostly what I've called occasional semweb bloggers. The ones in the main list are those that feed Planet RDF directly as already described by Edd in Planet Blog but it might not be quite clear how the content gets there.

It starts off with me editing the page above, adding or removing feeds. That page is written in XHTML since it is markup for humans and also a web page. The page is validated as legal XHTML by emacs nxml mode of course. For machines, I add some hints. Once I add an entry, it's marked up with a <span> and class that describe if the entry is a person or a group which affects the output RDF/FOAF class. This is then processed by XSLT into RDF/XML, the

bloggers.rdf file - also known as a FOAF blogroll - with a list of the bloggers, their names, the titles of their blogs (if it has one), their RSS 1.0 feeds etc. I expect this process possibly could be GRDDLed. (Most of the other Planet sites use this FOAF blogroll format that we created).

The bloggers.rdf page is read by the Planet RDF software to seed and control the RSS aggregation. The output of this is the aggregated RSS 1.0 feed (i.e. RDF) which also contains descriptive content from the bloggers.rdf file that is suffiicent for another XSLT script to process it to give the output Planet RDF XHTML web page - both the RSS content in the main content of the page along with the list of blogs in the sidebar.

So, the new blogs added are (in no particular order):

What this would benefit from is more RSS 1.0 feeds for categories of blogs; some people already do that for Planet RDF, I can see this being an increasing trend. Planet RDF doesn't read any RSS Tag Soup feeds at present due to the myth of RSS compatibility. Maybe Atom content will be added later if they can work out what they are identifying and it has a standard RDF mapping. RSS 1.0 works just fine till then and you can't beat it being stable for nearly 4 years.

Some interesting recent posts I saw from the above include: