SeedApplications

If I want to design a vocabulary for my university's course schedule, I'm happy to work on the bits that are specific to my university, but I'm not happy re-inventing basic vocabulary about times, places, and people. There's perhaps a critical mass of vocabularies that will seed wide adoption of the SemanticWeb. People, places, times, documents and money are recurring themes...

• People
  • social networking: FOAF, XFN
    • traditional approach is centralized: linked-in, flickr, friendster, ...
• contact info
  • vcard
    • hCard provides HTML-friendly syntax. With a grddl-happy hcard profile, we get nice semantic web data.
    • VCard RDF note
    • Norm Walsh's vcard RDF stuff * P3P
• resume information: DOAC
  • access control - DIX (LinkMe), InfoCard
• Places
  • GeoInfo -- latitude/longitude, airport codes, GIS, ...
  • hCard, adr, geo microformats/MicroModels
  • TravelTools -- formalizing travel itineraries... starting to use hCard and hCalendar
• Times and Events
  • RdfCalendar -- calendars are documents that relate people (and resources like conference bridges...) to times/events and places
• Documents, especially Photos
  • ImageDescription -- connecting image documents to times, places, and people
  • MeetingRecords -- documents that connect people to events
  • dublin core metadata, bibtex
  • RDF site summary (RSS), media RSS, Syndication, Aggregation, and Rating
    • SpotOfDrama explores some of the contemporary syntax and adoption issues.
• RFC822 email (see EmailVocabulary)
  • HTTP metadata
  • CVS metadata
    • OlinDan has built a servlet which returns CVS history information for one of the Olin College servers. See CVStoRDF (the output is rather lengthy). It uses the CVS ontology developed by Mike Dean at. The code is available as a .war file if you want to put your cvs history up as RDF.
• SoftwarePackaging metdata
  • DOAP
• Money
  • quacken converts quicken records to RDF and is starting to support hCard

At Extreme 2000, Michael said, "When you go meta, don't forget to come back". RDF started as a generalization of CDF, OSD, etc. Suppose we consider we're done factoring out the common assertion framework, and some of the modelling bits (RDFS, OWL) are stabilizing. So lets...

1. Integrate existing, real-world value networks of data into the SemanticWeb.

  For example, RdfCalendar integrates the data from the tools we use to organize
  our lives. SemanticWebForLifeSciences applies semantic web technologies to
  integration problems in life sciences.

1. Document the benefits of SemanticWeb integration, as well as

  the recurring problems; the combination of these should form PPR:DesignPatterns.
  Help document them here in the esw wiki.

1. Look for opportunities for consolidation in the VocabularyMarket.

We can document the data formats of OldeWorldeWebServices, which might play a similar seed role.