==== RDF - WTF? ====
**Notes by [[http://twitter.com/incanus77|Justin Miller]] -- sorry for typos/omissions**
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RDF is machine-readable information about information
triples: subject-predicate-object
anything in a relational DB can be represented in triples
    have a username: “joesmith is a user of X”
SPARQL: query language across resources
predicates themselves can, as human knowledge, be described in RDF as well
alternatives to using XML for RDF (which turned out to be verbose and bad)
    Turtle
practical applications
    biggest: FOAF (friend of a friend)
        describes social network information
        build it yourself, publish it on your site
        becomes your social network identity
        LiveJournal auto-publishes it for everyone
        WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type as well for years
        vast majority of live RDF today is FOAF
post info about RDF in Drupal
    http://drupal.org/project/rdf
    http://drupal.org/project/fileframework
tool called Zotero - like Evernote
    Firefox plugin
        bookmark a site, tag it (like Delicious)
        also: senses bibliographic info on the page & extracts it for your records
        example: your on an Amazon book page, Zotero saves info into your database
question: why use FOAF vs. some other format? 
    it’s already a standard
    tools already exist
N3 allows you to define formalae
    example: X is father of Y, A is cousin of Y, implies X is uncle of A
Thetus: “knowledge discovery software” (based in Portland)
interesting application: trust networks as extension of FOAF
downside: hard to store a lot of it
    generally you store it in your own format and export RDF (or make it available on demand)
    Billion Triple Challenge: project trying to tackle this challenge
question: anyone looked into using distributed things like CouchDB to store it? 
    problem is they are usually key-value, not triples
    someone needs to build a distributed storage DB for this? 
    storage of quads: adding security or lineage info as well
DBpedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia
    trying to take all of Wikipedia’s info and putting it into RDF
question: can we mashup the CIA World Factbook with Wikipedia? 
    that’s the dream of RDF, really
    if everything has an absolute URI, then it’s more easily possible
question: what about connecting FOAF info between, say, LJ and Blogger? 
    unfortunately a lot of current use is internal to organizations
    but you could write your own FOAF integrating across services and publish that
question: what happens when things change names (say: countries)
    depends on how you define your predicates
        “this country is another name for this country”
question: can you explain the OWL (Web Ontology Language) language? 
    http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
    includes mathematical and logical relationships
    example: saying a pine tree is a type of plant implies that plants include trees
also check out Yahoo’s YQL session today at 6:00pm