Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

> Thanks,
>
> -- Jeff
> ________________________________________
> Jeff Finkelstein
> 303.499.9318 x 8282
> mailto:jeff@...
> http://www.customerparadigm.com
>
> Customer Paradigm
> 5353 Manhattan Circle, Suite 103
> Boulder, Colorado 80303
>
> Recently Featured Websites:
> http://www.adventurerabbi.org
> http://www.boulderjews.org
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: semantic-web-request@... [mailto:semantic-web-request@...] On
> Behalf Of Martin Hepp (UniBW)
> Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:44 AM
> To: Danny Ayers
> Cc: bill.roberts@...; public-lod@...; semantic-web at W3C
> Subject: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re:
> RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation
>
> Hi all:
>
> After about two months of helping people generate RDF/XML metadata for their
> businesses using the GoodRelations annotator [1], I have quite some evidence
> that the current best practices of using .htaccess are a MAJOR bottleneck
> for the adoption of Semantic Web technology.
>
> Just some data:
> - We have several hundred entries in the annotator log - most people spend
> 10 or more minutes to create a reasonable description of themselves.
> - Even though they all operate some sort of Web sites, less than 30 % of
> them manage to upload/publish a single *.rdf file in their root directory.
> - Of those 30%, only a fraction manage to set up content negotiation
> properly, even though we provide a step-by-step recipe.
>
> The effects are
> - URIs that are not dereferencable,
> - incorrect media types and
> and other problems.
>
> When investigating the causes and trying to help people, we encountered a
> variety of configurations and causes that we did not expect. It turned out
> that helping people just managing this tiny step of publishing Semantic Web
> data would turn into a full-time job for 1 - 2 administrators.
>
> Typical causes of problems are
> - Lack of privileges for .htaccess (many cheap hosting packages give limited
> or no access to .htaccess)
> - Users without Unix background had trouble name a file so that it begins
> with a dot
> - Microsoft IIS require completely different recipes
> - Many users have access just at a CMS level
>
> Bottomline:
> - For researchers in the field, it is a doable task to set up an Apache
> server so that it serves RDF content according to current best practices.
> - For most people out there in reality, this is regularly a prohibitively
> difficult task, both because of a lack of skills and a variety in the
> technical environments that turns into an engineering challenge what is easy
> on the textbook-level.
>
> As a consequence, we will modify our tool so that it generates "dummy"
> RDFa code with span/div that *just* represents the meta-data without
> interfering with the presentation layer.
> That can then be inserted as code snippets via copy-and-paste to any XHTML
> document.
>
> Any opinions?
>
> Best
> Martin
>
> [1]  http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Danny Ayers wrote:
>  
>> Thank you for the excellent questions, Bill.
>>
>> Right now IMHO the best bet is probably just to pick whichever format
>> you are most comfortable with (yup "it depends") and use that as the
>> single source, transforming perhaps with scripts to generate the
>> alternate representations for conneg.
>>
>> As far as I'm aware we don't yet have an easy templating engine for
>> RDFa, so I suspect having that as the source is probably a good choice
>> for typical Web applications.
>>
>> As mentioned already GRDDL is available for transforming on the fly,
>> though I'm not sure of the level of client engine support at present.
>> Ditto providing a SPARQL endpoint is another way of maximising the
>> surface area of the data.
>>
>> But the key step has clearly been taken, that decision to publish data
>> directly without needing the human element to interpret it.
>>
>> I claim *win* for the Semantic Web, even if it'll still be a few years
>> before we see applications exploiting it in a way that provides real
>> benefit for the end user.
>>
>> my 2 cents.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Danny.
>>
>>
>>  
>>    
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  mhepp@...
> phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>          http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp
> twitter: mfhepp
>
> Check out the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
> ========================================================================
>
> Webcast:
> http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>
> Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
> "Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
> http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
>
> Tool for registering your business:
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
> Overview article on Semantic Universe:
> http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
>
> Project page and resources for developers:
> http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>
> Tutorial materials:
> Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on
> Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
>
> http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009
>
>
>
>
>
>  
>  
> ****************************************************************************
> ********
> This footnote confirms that this email message has been scanned by PineApp
> Mail-SeCure for the presence of malicious code, vandals & computer viruses.
> ****************************************************************************
> ********
>
>
>
>
>
>
>