1. Harpers.org: a Semantic Web(ish) site for Harper’s Magazine Paul Ford Associate Web Editor, Harpers.org ford@harpers.org

2. Harper’s is…  A magazine of literature, politics, culture, and the arts published continuously from 1850  A small non-profit

3. Available content  The Weekly Review, an emailed summary of world events, from 2000  The Harper’s Index, a statistical portrait of the world, from 1998  Public domain, scanned-in archives from 1850-1982  Readings  Occasional features

4. And that’s it.  Maybe full text of issues will be offered someday, but not soon. So…  How do we get more value out of limited content?

5. Solution  Hack up the what we have into bits by content type, then…  Reassemble it according to link targets…  Which are arranged in a taxonomy…  Creating a very small “Semantic Web” for Harpers.org

6. A quick demo…  >>> >>>

7. How it works  Simple set of ontological relationships (partOf, supervisorOf)  Taxonomy of content  & narrative content  that is split into smaller pieces  & links into the taxonomy

8. Markup  Text: “ Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z. On Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.”

9. Markup Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z. On Wednesday, something happened to persons W and X.

10. Markup Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z.

11. Markup Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z.

12. Conditionals  Some text required conditional markup  Text: “ Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z, and o n Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.”

13. Conditionals: ugly, but simple Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z, and. on On o n Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.

14. Conditionals: ugly, but simple  Narrative version  Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z, and o n Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.  Timeline-friendly version  Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z.  On Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.

15. All of it gets slurped up  And turned into a set of triples  Then processed in-memory  With HTML pages spit out as a result

16. Hard, then easy  Hard to get started (lots of events, facts, and links)  Easy to keep going, if you don’t mind the markup and use a good text editor

17. Tools used  emacs, vi, bbedit  XSLT2.0 (SAXON)  CVS

18. Why not RDF?  Not right for redundant content and conditionals  Easy enough to transform arbitrary structured XML into RDF with XSLT, as needed  (Or into RSS1.0, RSS2.0, Atom, etc.) ?

19. For free…  From 300 individual pages…  To 1100 pages of “remixed” content – all unique and relevant  And Google-friendly

20. And also for free…  Semantically relevant in-site advertising, if we want it  Topic-sorted, reusable content  Permanent, readable URIs

21. Do people get it?  Some do, and others just navigate the site as usual  Harper’s was fine with the learning curve  “Odd but useful” – Gawker

22. Results  Uptick in traffic and subscription revenues  Low cost of maintenance  Ever-increasing database of facts and events – adding one Weekly Review adds value to 50 different pages  Happy client

23. Why the SemWeb(ish) framework?  Leaves plenty of room to grow  Web-only content  Full text of issues  Subscriber services  Etc  Take advantage of new SemWeb tools  Incorporate RDF sources into the taxonomy  Anticipate Semantic Web browsers

24. Next?

25. Make it pretty  Redesign  Hide some of the navigation  Turn links on and off

26. Make it scale  Currently maxes out at about 20-30 megs of content, due to limits of in-memory DOM representation (10-12x XML document size)  Use a publicly available storage layer (Kowari, Jena, etc)  Go triple-crazy

27. Make it easy to query and navigate  “Show me everything related to George Bush and Iraq.” or  “Show me everything related to politicians and the Middle East.”  New navigation  ?