Semergence

After thinking about this for a little while, and with the discussions on this blog, I offer some suggestions to make blogs more friendly and useful to the semantic web.

1. Put triples describing comments and comment authors inside RSS - This would help with the comment spam problem and start to build a web of trust wrt posting to blogs. Movable Type’s TypeKey system solves the authentication problem. By finding triples of the blog comments, I feel we can help with the second level to the problem: authorization.
2. RSS feeds should populate dc:references with URIs used in blog entry body - Typically, blog entries include one or more URIs in the body of the entry. By making those URIs explicitly available via triples inside the RSS, more accurate and interesting information becomes available. Specifically, the question of "What are people blogging about?" becomes easier to answer.
3. Encourage Blog authors to include dc:subject, and help define what might go in there - By starting to label blog entries with information on their subject (what the entry might be about), ad hoc planet* sites can be built. These planet* sites scan all the RSS looking for entries about particular subject matters and aggregate the entries. For this to work, there would be a way for an aggregator to declare a mapping between the values of dc:subject found in the wild, and the recognized values of the aggregator (OWL helps here a lot).

Thoughts or comments?

I found a Blog Comments Module for RSS, so I’ve hacked it into my Movable Type’s index.rdf generation. My index.rdf is still RSS 1.0 (RDF).

First, I put this block in my template:

<blogcomments:comments>
<MTComments>
      <blogcomments:comment>
    <blogcomments:name><$MTCommentAuthor></blogcomments:name>
        <blogcomments:email
             rdf:resource="mailto:<$MTCommentEmail spam_protect="0"$>"/>
        <blogcomments:ip><$MTCommentIP></blogcomments:ip>
        <blogcomments:date><$MTCommentDate></blogcomments:date>
        <blogcomments:body>
          <![CDATA[<$MTCommentBody convert_breaks="0"$>]]>
        </blogcomments:body>
      </blogcomments:comment>
</MTComments>
</blogcomments:comments>

Next up, I will add a smidge of OWL to say that a blogcomments:email is the sameAs foaf:mbox.

Then, the next simple step is to get everyone in the world doing this! Remember, if you add this into your index.rdf for your blog, then trust web authorization services can be built. If you assume that those that comment spam is deleted, the mere fact that posts exist out on the web by an authenticated user must be a good sign.

While the world is updating their blogs to include these new triples, and gearing up for TypeKey, the semweb community can start building the authorization service.

My Movable Type install is now fighting comment spam with mt-blacklist.

This would be great if it reported spam hits in real time via XML-RPC to a central server. And, of course, if this plugin could then pull that list or check it in real time, all the better! This is a great use for P2P, or at least, automated collection and retrieval of information.