Configuration

After you downloaded and extracted the Triplify script into your Web application you have to create a Triplify configuration suitable for your Web application. You can view the Triplify example configuration with detailed explanations.

Once a Web application was “triplized” this configuration can be reused for all subsequent installations of the same Web application. This page contains community contributed Triplify configurations. Feel free to add configurations you created or just send them to us by email and we will add them here.

Application and link to config.inc.php:

• OpenConf: 2.0 (contributed by Sören)
• Drupal: 5.x [with CCK] (contributed by David)
• WackoWiki: 4.2 (contributed by Sören)
• WordPress: 2.1 (contributed by Sören)
• OpenJournalSystems: 2.0 (contributed by Sören)
• Joomla! (contributed by Le Phuoc)

Integrating Triplify into Web applications

Triplify is most beneficial, when it becomes a direct part of the main-stream distribution of standard Web applications such as CMS, Wikis, Blogs etc.. Since, Triplify is very light-weight it is extremely easy to integrate into such Web applications:

• add the Triplify folder to the root folder of your Web application
• configure SQL queries selecting the information to be exposed
• make sure Triplify uses the database connection parameters of the Web application, this is usually achieved by including the Web applications configuration file and creating the PDO object or MySQL connection string by using the respective configuration values
• modify the installation procedure of your Web application, so that the triplify/cache/ folder is writable by the Web server or change the Triplify configuration variable $triplify['cachedir']
• make sure that the installation procedure registers the Triplify instance with the Registry, so it can be found by other Semantic Web applications. This can be simply done by accessing http://triplify.org/register/?url='.urlencode($baseURI).'&type='.urlencode($triplify['namespaces']['vocabulary']) either by means of fopen() or by embedding a corresponding link (e.g. within an iframe) in the installer

Such a triplification of your Web application has tremendous advantages:

• The installations of the Web application are better found and search engines can better evaluate the content.
• Different installations of the Web application can easily syndicate arbitrary content without the need to adopt interfaces, content representations or protocols, even when the content structures change.
• It is possible to create custom tailored search engines targeted at a certain niche. Imagine a search engine for products, which can be queried for digital cameras with high resolution and large zoom.

Ultimately, a triplification will counteract the centralization we faced through Google, YouTube and Facebook and lead to an increased democratization of the Web

Using Triplify Data

Creating Mashups

Probably the largest benefit when using Triplify is that your Web application becomes easily mashable with other Web data sources.

• Simile Potluck allows to mix and mash any Triplify data sources without any programming
• Yahoo! Pipes – Triplify instances can be used as data sources within Yahoo!'s pipe designer
• Programmableweb – provides a database of API's, which can be combined with Triplify data sources
• JSON output: simply append ?t-output=json to any Triplify URI and you can easily access Triplify data, even without an RDF/N3 parser

Semantic Search

Search engines, which exploit semantic representations are still rare or in early stages.

• Sindice is a lookup index for Semantic Web documents
• SWSE
• Swoogle is probably the oldest Semantic Web search engine

Registered Triplify data sources will be submitted to these and any upcoming future semantic search engines.

RDF and Linked Data Browser

There some RDF browsers available, which allow to browse and filter Triplify data:

• OpenLink RDF Browser
• Tabulator
• Exhibit

Just enter the URL of your Triplify installation and start browsing your data.

Vocabularies and Links

Vocabularies

When creating Triplify configurations try to reuse existing vocabularies as much as possible. Some central vocabularies are:

• Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project published a vocabulary specification for expressing information about people and their relationships.
• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project provides a vocabulary for interconnecting community generated content and discussions such as blog, forum and mailing list posts as well as Wiki articles.
• Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS) is a family of vocabularies designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems.
• Beer Ontology – probably the most important vocabulary on the Semantic Web ;-)

A comprehensive list of vocabularies can be also found at: http://schemaweb.info.

Links

W3C's Semantic Web initiative is an umbrella for many standards (such as RDF) and activities aiming at bringing more structure to the Web.

• The Open Knowledge Foundation is devoted to promoting and protecting open knowledge.
• DataPortability is devoted to increase awareness for preventing data lock-ins in certain applications or services.
• Linked Data is recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.
• D2RQ – Treating Non-RDF Databases as Virtual RDF Graphs. D2RQ has basically the same aim as Triplify, however, it is more difficult to deploy. It also includes its own mapping language to map DB content to ontologies, where Triplify just uses SQL. Other than Triplify D2RQ also contains SPARQL endpoint functionality.
• Openlink's Sponger allows to access non-RDF data sources using SPARQL.
• DBpedia “semantifies” Wikipedia by providing RDF datasets and a SPARQL endpoint for semantics extracted from Wikipedia.