There's a need in many institutes to share knowledge. For instance a project made by them that consists of some 100 plone websites that have to exchange documents and so about cultural heritage in Campania. Not all documents have the same document schema, so a common semantic web document model was made to share it all.
They've got a nifty system with which you can extend, content-based, content types with extra fields. Of course, you need zope3 technologies to pull it off. This makes for a very flexible system. The definition of the new content types is done with a small custom-made XML format, btw. Storage can also be specified (images on the filesystem, fields in postgresql, for inststance). They have a tool that can additionally convert the XML format to archetypes schemas.
Advantage of the component model: clear separation between data logic and the other layers.
Information is exchanged in XML. With adapters, you can export documents in various XML formats. A special contenttype called RemoteContent is a link to a remote document; the octapy semantic mechanism takes care of extracting the information and displaying it locally. With an RDF export, the basic data about a contenttype can be communicated in a structured way (with some rdf:subClassOf, rdf:label, etc.).
One question was whether they used RDF and semantic querying to discover/find content. The answer was that they had a lot of different document types. And to catch all those in a semantically meaningful taxonomy is hard. Searching also costs a lot of time. They're trying to get something working, though.
Technorati tag: ploneconf2007
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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