Drupal, Open Standards and the Semantic Web

At the heart of the semantic web lie a series of open standards. Drupal is one of the most standards compliant CMS' available today supporting: RSS 1.1 and RSS 2, OCS, Jabber, RSD, XFML, XML-RPC, Soap and others. Although standards are "standard" there are eccentricities and subtleties that catch the author / user of a CMS. This presentation focuses on the standards implemented in Drupal, their relevance to the semantic web and the implementation lessons we have learned. The presentation will begin by talking about Drupal's plugin architecture which lets new protocols easily be added to an existing installation as they become available.

A sidebar to this presentation would include a look at Drupal's Distributed Authentication system which lets users of alternative login systems use those logins on their Drupal application. This clearly involves reverse engineering application specific "standards".

J. Scott Johnson
President, The FuzzyGroup, Inc.
sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com
www.fuzzygroup.com
www.fuzzyblog.com
Yahoo IM: fuzzygroup
AOL IM: fuzzygroup