[expertfinder-dev] Firefox 3 does FOAF and SIOC

[Dan Brickley]

Lyndon J B Nixon wrote:
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> The title got your attention ;)
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>  
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> Well, they want to support microformats at least
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> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_does_microformats_firefox3.php 
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>
>  
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> but I wonder if we could make some nice proposals to them why FOAF, 
> SIOC etc support might be just as cool J
>
There is some skeptism in the Mozilla scene about the value of their 
existing investment in RDF.

They had the first RDF implementation out there, since it evolved from 
Guha's earlier MCF code for Netscape. It is showing it's age and has 
never really caught developers imagination. There's a page somewhere in 
their wikis talking about SQLLite as a data storage option for future 
Mozilla platform, somewhere near here
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Requirements

I was thinking: there are a few efforts at implementing SPARQL in 
scripting languages over the top of an SQL engine, eg. ARC in PHP, see 
http://arc.web-semantics.org/  .... if one of these SPARQL-over-SQL 
implementations could be recoded in Javascript for SQLLite, it would 
open up a much nicer environment for RDF work in Mozilla: developers 
could use an SQL-like language, a storage neutral abstraction (RDF), 
world-wide rather than storage-specific schemas, ... and also use the 
SQLlite store for storing multiple RDF graphs, queryable using SPARQL's 
multi-graph support.

This would I believe make Mozilla RDF application code a lot less 
verbose, a lot more powerful, and would tie in with their future storage 
strategy. All it needs is someone to implement it ;)

cheers,

Dan