Instructor: Benjamin Nowack

Whether you call it Web 3.0, the Web of Data, or the Semantic Web, fact is that the next generation of web applications will have to support distributed information sources, externally-defined models, data portability, and powerful APIs. Run-time-adaptable applications and the ability to efficiently combine different technologies and formats will more and more be an important factor of success. Scripting languages like PHP have always been a good choice for dynamic environments and integration tasks. PHP helps reduce implementation time and often plays a central role in closing the gap between sophisticated back-end systems and user-friendly front-ends, which makes it well-suited for semantic web projects, too.

This hands-on workshop explores essential semantic web technologies and how they can be utilized by PHP developers (for both semantic as well as classical apps). By analyzing and extending a basic semantic web application, you will get to know specifications, current trends, best practices, limitations, and both technical and business-related opportunities.

Topics covered

• Characteristics of a semantic web application
• How semantic web technologies can improve typical web architectures
• Getting started: Opportunities, trade-offs and general considerations for new projects
• The Semantic Web Technology Menu and how to avoid overeating
• Quick introduction to RDF and Linked Data
• Triple/Graph-oriented software development
• PHP-related RDF tools, efforts, and projects
• Building a semantic web application with RDF, SPARQL, and PHP
  • The agile aspects of RDF and SPARQL
  • Quick introduction to ARC and Trice
  • Read/Write SPARQL
  • Request handling on the Web of Data
  • URIs, APIs, and data portability (Pros and Cons)
  • The vocabulary market
  • Annotations with RDFa and microformats
  • RDF/RDFS-enhanced user interfaces
  • Utilizing the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud
  • Using external entity extraction services (Zemanta/OpenCalais)
  • Pragmatic inference
  • SPARQLScript and SPARQL widgets
• Performance and scalability considerations, upgrade paths
• Lessons learned

Speaker Info

Benjamin Nowack is a long-time member of the RDF community, founder of semantic web company Semsol [http://semsol.com], and a pioneer in utilizing RDF technology for agency-level web projects. He is the maintainer of ARC [http://arc.semsol.org] (a pure PHP/MySQL RDF toolkit) and Trice [http://trice.semsol.org] (a web application framework based on ARC). Semsol's practical solutions won several international awards, such as the Semantic Scripting Challenge and the Semantic Web Challenge. Benjamin contributed to the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO) as an Invited Expert. A detailed profile is available at http://bnode.org/about