Squio.blog

Triplify your blog

Do you want to make your blog Semantic Web ready, but don’t know where to start?

Just download and install the Triplify script, a lightweight tool to translate SQL query results into RDF triples and return the result in N3 (Notation3) or as JSON.

The script itself is only capable of generating RDF, the actual matching between data and RDF output is specified in a configuration file. These configurations are available for many popular web applications, here is a Triplify configuration for WordPress 2.7.x.

Installing is almost as simple as dropping the triplify directory in your WordPress root directory and uploading the correct configuration file. No need to configure any specific values for your WordPress set-up, these are read from the top level wp-config.php file.

Now go to your blog and request the URL http://yourblog/triplify/ – this will return your blog’s content as RDF/N3 and at the same time register the feed at the Triplify Registration (well, if you leave the register switch at “true” in the config file).

Now you dan play with your RDF data in various sources on the web, or locally.

A good start for exploration is the SIMILE Welkin browser, also available as Java web start: run Welkin thru Java WebStart.

Continue for an example…

The following screen shot gives an impression how the top level RDF data looks for this blog.

Hurdles

In practice, I met some hurdles to overcome.

To start with, the config file is presented as nicely formatted and colored source code. Make sure you save this as plain (ascii) text, otherwise you will get strange error messages because of non-breaking spaces and other bad characters in the source.

Then, if you use the anti-spam plugin “bad-behavior” you will notice that some web resources don’t give any result or seem to hang forever. I found this with Simile (Exhibit, Potluck) and the Sindice search index engine.

Add the following IP addresses to bad-behavoir/whitelist.inc.php:

    $bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
        [...]
        "18.51.2.218",         // Simile.MIT.EDU 18.51.2.218
        "140.203.154.173",     // Sindice Fetcher
    );

Happy experimenting!

A nice paper about Triplify will be presented at the coming WWW conference: Triplify – Light-weight Linked Data Publication from Relational Databases