In the first version of the pinging service I was only checking at the namespaces to know where was belonging a RDF documents (to SIOC, FOAF, DOAP or to another ontology). After some conversations I revised the method used and I upgraded the auto-discovery (classification system) of the pinging system.

Now I validate and classify each RDF documents in three steps:

1. I check if the RDF header is present in the “RDF document”.
2. Then I check if the namespace of the ontology (SIOC, FOAF or DOAP) is used in the RDF document (as base namespace of the RDF document or with prefix).
3. Finally I check if I can find an instance of a class of the ontology somewhere in the RDF document.

If these three steps are true, I will classify the RDF document accordingly (a file can be classified in more than one section). Otherwise, I will add it to the list of pinged RDF documents (non-categorized ones).

 

Re-indexing

I deleted all the databases and re-indexed all the RDF documents using this new classification technique. Now all the little classification glitches some people experimented should be past. Now you should see the ping appearing in the list only if an instance of the ontology is defined in the RDF document.

 

Bugs

Naturally 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 weekend considering that I’ll be off in the wood without any possible communication; so it should work properly, without any problems, but we never know 🙂

 

Open question

There is still an open question raised by Tim Finin as a comment on my last blog post. I will check what I could do this next Monday; however if someone have an idea, please leave it as a comment on this blog post.

Technorati: Pingthesemanticweb | semantic | web | ping | foaf | doap | sioc | ontology | web2.0 |