Building environmental semantic web applications with drupal

Abstract

Efforts required for publishing information as Linked Data often appears too high compared to obvious and immediate benefits. Consequently, only a tiny fraction of the web can be easily used as a semantic "database" today. Drupal 7 changes the rules of the game by integrating the functionality required for structuring and semantically annotating arbitrary content types in the Drupal "core", as well as encouraging the module authors to use this functionality in their Drupal extensions. This paper presents the authors recent experiences with strengths and shortcomings of the Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 semantic web extensions, and discusses feasibility of the future semantic web environmental applications based on a Drupal platform. The intention of the paper is (1) to analyse the state of the art in semantic web support, as well as the potentials for further development in Drupal today; (2) to prove the feasibility of Drupal based semantic web applications for environmental usage area; and (3) to introduce the idea of Drupal as a rapid prototyping development environment. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.