Monday, 5/21/2007
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Level: Technical - Intermediate

The Semantic Web is not a new Web. It is a new stage of the existing Web. There seems to be a growing tendency to forget about the "Web" part in favor of ever more esoteric semantic nuance. In order to achieve better adoption of even the lower level technologies, they must be more directly integrated into existing web-oriented infrastructures. This hands on tutorial will focus on one possible integration of Semantic Web metadata technologies with NetKernel, an open-source resource-oriented environment. By leveraging NetKernel's ground-up support for REST and its influences from both Unix pipes and SOA architectures, we will show how to build a scalable RDF-processing framework on top of data sources that are already being used. This type of integration can be trivially integrated into existing web and app server infrastructures to semantically-enable more conventional web-based systems.

• Introduction to REST
• NetKernel as a REST engine
• NetKernel for XML processing
• Extending NetKernel for Semantic Web processing
• Introduction to GRDDL/RDFa
• RDF storage and query
• example pipelines such as
• Consumer-oriented: GRDDL: harvesting vcards, ical, RDF/XML
• Producer-oriented: RDFa: Semantic markup of existing XHTML
• Consuming RDF in the browser
• Project Simile Firefox extensions
• RDFa and AJAX

Brian Sletten and David Wood are both accomplished software architects, developers, and consultants, as well as frequent speakers on advanced technical concepts. Both are committers on the Mulgara RDF Triplestore open source project. Brian Sletten is a liberal - arts-educated software engineer and frequent speaker for the NoFluffJustStuff tour where he speaks nationally about REST, the Semantic Web, Aspect-Oriented Programming, and various other software engineering topics. He has been involved in multiple large-scale Semantic Web projects, including a document processing pipeline for automatic markup of unstructured data. Brian will be chairing the Demos Track at OOPSLA 2007.

David Wood is the former CTO and founder of Tucana Technologies and has been a member of the W3C where he has worked on projects such as the Policy Aware Web. David is also currently pursuing his Ph.D. through the University of Queensland where he is focusing on the application of Semantic Web technologies to the problem of software maintenance.