Click here to watch Linked Data + Drupal for Oceanographic data management

The Linked Data community has found itself emerging from what Gartner's Hype Cycle called the "Trough of Disillusionment". Others have referred to this place along the technology adoption curve as:

• Pit of Sarlacc
• Swamp of Sadness
• Bog of Eternal Stench
• [insert your favorite mythological hurdle here]

For the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO, http://www.bco-dmo.org), the adoption of Drupal has aided in our rescue from disillusionment about the practicality of Semantic Web technologies for improved end-user applications. This session will discuss how:

• Drupal currently fits into the Linked Data landscape
  (contrib modules + contrib patches + custom modules)
   
• what improvements can be made for increased engagement on important semantic web technology gaps

BCO-DMO, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work with ocean science researchers to improve data management, discovery, and re-use. We use Drupal to help us manage information about the research data. This includes what was collected, how, by whom, where, and why - the metadata. Semantic web technologies help us describe all the intricate relationships between these metadata so that external systems can make sense of it and use it appropriately for tasks like data discovery.

For researchers, the success of data discovery revolves around the capability to ask complex questions of knowledge centers like BCO-DMO.

Our ability to accurately respond depends on our system's capability:

• to understand the question
• interpret its relevancy to what we know
• return those results in a way a human can digest.

Application development at BCO-DMO always starts with a science-driven use case - something a human can ask for and digest. One of the outcomes of this process was a mapping interface for discovering ocean science research data. This UI is driven by our Drupal content, described using Linked Open Data principles, and the connections from that content to other relevant, external knowledge centers.

Contributed modules such as:

• sparql
• rdfx
• rdf_indexer

help BCO-DMO semantically describe and publish our Drupal content as well as enable content mashups with other external resources. However, our use cases required functionality these modules alone did not support. We will discuss, through these contrib modules, custom modules, and contributed patches, how we are approaching

• URI management
• content extension
• ontology versioning
• external triplestore population (Virtuoso)

The BCO-DMO story is scratching the surface of the possibilities Drupal has for addressing the needs of the Semantic Web community. Drupal is positioned as a suitable platform for tools that can visualize semantic data, promote improvements in ontology alignment, and more.