I just finished implementing a new feature, to PingtheSemanticWeb, that has been requested by many people: being able to get a list of pings based on the namespaces defined in a RDF document.

The motivation was that many RDF document like RSS 1.0 could be of no use for some type of web services or software agents. So we needed to filter them by defined namespaces.

 

How does it work?

Tim Finin from Swoogle sent me an associative list of the most commonly used namespaces prefixes for the most commonly tracked ontologies by Swoogle.

When I receive a ping for a RDF document, I extract all the namespaces defined, I check their “most commonly used prefixes” and I add them to the pinging list with these prefixes.

That way, if you want the list of RDF documents with the defined namespaces “foaf” or “doap”, you only have to fill the “Pings received with these namespaces” (in the export page) box with the string “foaf doap” (note: all prefixes are “spaces separated”). That way, you will receive the list of all pings received by PingtheSemanticWeb having the namespaces “foaf” and “doap” defined in their RDF documents.

Then a crawler will have to get the list of namespaces prefix in the “types” attribute of an “rdfdocument” element, split all the prefixes, and check in the associative array of the namespaces and their prefixes to know which ontologies are in the RDF document.

 

Modification to the export format

The version of the export format is now set to “1.1”. I added a new attribute to the “rdfdocument” called “ns”. Now a pings export file look like:

 

<pingthesemanticwebUpdate version=”1.1″ updated=”2006-08-11 11:20:54″>

<rdfdocument url=”http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php?sioc_type=post&sioc_id=300″ created=”2006-08-11 11:21:00″ updated=”2006-08-14 09:57:26″ topics=”semantic web foaf technology WordPress sioc” ns=”foaf rss admin dc rdfs rdf content sioc” />

</pingthesemanticwebUpdate>

 

Where “ns” is the string that contains all the “most commonly used prefixes” for namespaces defined in this RDF document. Note that namespaces prefixes are spaces separated.

 

Bugs

I re-iter by bug warning: “there are probably some bugs left. If you find inconsistencies, please send me an email at [fred] at [fgiasson.com] so I’ll fix it as soon as possible. I will not be able to fix it this between the 23 to the 26 August considering that I’ll be off for my summer vacancies in the Maine; so it should work properly, without any problems, but we never know”

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