Gábor's blog

the semantic web always interested me. i’ve read the tutorials on RDF and N3, i even bought a book about it.

but somehow i cannot see how it could help me currently. don’t get me wrong, i understand it’s benefits (making the web machine-readable). but i don’t see any PRACTICAL applications of this technology currently. nevertheless, i’m always willing to try out new toys in this field.

today i’ve read a blog post about using semantic-web-stuff on your blog. so i immediately decided to try it out.

there was a wordpress plugin recommended, which i installed.

the plugin simply generates some machine-readable about your blog posts in SIOC format.

additionally, after you have set it up, and so you have SIOC data available about your blog, you can notify about your blog posts the Ping the Semantic Web service, which seems to be a semantic-data indexing/searching system. (this notification can happen automatically by wordpress, if you decide so).

on the Ping the Semantic Web site, they list the recently updated RDF documents.

and what did i find there? http://galleries.penthouse.com/labels.rdf :)

yes, a link to an RDF document at Penthouse’s website. i must admit, i was surprised. what do they have to do with RDF? so i went to http://galleries.penthouse.com, which redirected me to http://www.penthouse.com. by checking the source code of the page, i found that they indeed link to an rdf document

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ICRA seems to be a content-rating organization. they have a web-based questionnaire, which supposedly (info from wikipedia) generates an RDF file, which then describes the rating of the site’s content, which you can link from your website. the rating seems to be focused on the parental-control aspect.

it was certainly surprising/refreshing to see that one of the early-adopters of the semantic-web technology is a porn site :)

(maybe these porn sites must include some kind of rating/parental-control stuff, i don’t know. i checked www.playboy.com, and they did not link to any rdf documents…. )