Publishing Linked Open Data in a user-appealing way is still a challenge: Generic solutions to convert arbitrary RDF structures to HTML out-of-the-box are available, but leave users perplexed. Custom-built web applications to enrich web pages with semantic tags "under the hood" require high efforts in programming. Given this dilemma, content management systems (CMS) could be a natural enhancement point for data on the web. In the case of Drupal, one of the most popular CMS nowadays, Semantic Web enrichment is provided as part of the CMS core. In a simple declarative approach, classes and properties from arbitrary vocabularies can be added to Drupal content types and fields, and are turned into Linked Data on the web pages automagically. The embedded RDFa marked-up data can be easily extracted by other applications. This makes the pages part of the emerging Web of Data, and in the same course helps discoverability with the major search engines.
In the workshop, you will learn how to make use of the built-in Drupal 7 features to produce RDFa enriched pages. You will build new content types, add custom fields and enhance them with RDF markup from mixed vocabularies. The gory details of providing LOD-compatible "cool" URIs will not be skipped, and current limitations of RDF support in Drupal will be explained. Exposing the data in a REST-ful application programming interface or as a SPARQL endpoint are additional options provided by Drupal modules. The workshop will also introduce modules such as Web Taxonomy, which allows linking to thesauri or authority files on the web via simple JSON-based autocomplete lookup. Finally, we will touch the upcoming Drupal 8 version. (Workshop announcement)