Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Phase2 Technology is focused on helping publishers move into the realm of linked data through efforts such as its work with Thomson Reuters to deliver Calais modules for integration with content management system Drupal. Last week, it announced a deal with Apture to enable publishers using Drupal to take advantage of Apture’s platform to include rich multimedia content by simply clicking on the item to embed. That’s perhaps more of a semantic play for the future than for today.

“Apture has essentially what we see as great eye candy,” says Jeff Walpole, managing partner at Phase2 . “It gives an editor the ability to create a little more dynamic inline linking. It lets an editor select things, and pull up other multimedia- oriented resources to define that term a little bit deeper.”

Apture basically lets users combine multimedia content from around the web, together in one place, associating an item with related media to build a web of information that helps users learn more about the topic the publisher is writing about.

“It’s not a true semantic play at this point,” says Walpole, but he sees possibilities in additional intelligence being added to Aperture’s technology. “They are increasingly providing smart tools to semantically link in the things that you are interested in. That technology is fairly immature at this point, but it can go farther. What’s important for now is the tool lets you link to things in an interesting way.”

And Phase2 is indeed very interested in finding interesting “whiz-bang” semantic web technologies to incorporate into Drupal. What might the future hold? “I think another thing that’s really interesting and taking off in Drupal is more content exchange technologies,” says Walpole. “Part of the semantic web concept is obviously linking disparate pieces of information together. From a pure content management system perspective, that’s great. But it needs to be coupled with the fact that people just want to be able to borrow content from each other. We don’t make huge distinctions anymore about what site is serving content. Content exchange as a theme interplays very nicely with semantic web technologies.”

One of the problems to solve here will be how to keep ownership straight. “But that’s the same problem the semantic web has with itself. If you borrow from everyone else and link to everyone else, where does your content end and someone else’s begin?”

Walpole isn’t pretending he has the answers yet, but he knows companies such as his have to be asking those questions and ultimately devising some solutions. In the meantime, look for Phase2 to put some more energy into the area of federated identity management. The publishing market it serves hasn’t been hugely interested in the area, as such companies don’t usually have the extensive employee bases and the need to control and manage access that banks, health care providers, and insurance companies do. But as the semantic web gains stature, the time may be right to renew interest.

“I find the linkages between the way that [federated identity management] works and semantic data exchange to be really interesting,” says Walpole, who notes that Phase2 was involved in Sun’s federated identity management product development and also was one of the original members of the Liberty Alliance, which seeks to establish an open standard for federated network identity through open technical specifications.

“It’s essentially the identity equivalent of semantic data. So it’s my identity being distributed and proliferated, my credentials to access certain things across the web,” he says. “When you bring those concepts together, we are eventually going to train users to think of the web as one big blob of stuff they can use, like the original Tim Berners-Lee W3C concept. I find that fascinating that what we do with individuals and identities is mirroring what we do with content and data to the point where, if those two evolve at the same time, we really have closed the loop.”

Overall, semantic web interest in the Drupal community is bubbling up. At Drupalcon Szeged 2008 there will be a presentation on the Neologism project, a lightweight web-based vocabulary editor and publishing tool built with Drupal, which is touted as constituting a building block for the Semantic Web. The tool, which supports HTML, RDF/XML, and N3, lets users create a vocabulary, add classes and properties to it, and then instantly publish and make it available online.

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