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| New Druple Triple Store Powered Site |
Despite being a junior, this was my first time participating in an URP and my first introduction to the Semantic web. I had heard the term ”semantic” once or twice, but never gave it much thought as anything more than being another study in computer science that I would never delve into. All that changed when I joined up with the Tetherless World Constellation. I browsed through the open projects and eventually settled into the website recreation for the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office, or BCO-DMO for short.
The original BCO-DMO site used a more traditional relational database, but the goal of TWC’s version was to show that an external triple store could be used to accomplish just as much, if not more. At the onset I had absolutely no idea how to use any of the tools, languages, or logic systems that would form the meat and bones of the new site. On the basest level we needed to learn and implement a language that would be able to draw data out of the triple store for future use. This of course meant that we needed to use the Sparql Protocol and RDF Query Language, or Sparql. Each aspect of the new site needed its own Sparql query to pull the needed data; each category of data had one query for returning a general list of every member of that category and another query for returning specific data for each of these individual members. Once we had a way to find the data we wanted, we needed something to use it, that’s where Xpath and XSLT came into play. By having the Sparql queries return their results in XML format we could have XSL files converting those results into HTML that can easily be used on the website. I felt like this was a biggest bottleneck since our entire team seemed to grind to a halt when it came to actually writing XSLT code. It almost seemed like we weren’t going to finish this semester until Ali Nendick joined onto the BCO-DMO team. After I saw her making more progress in a day then we made in weeks I was compelled to try and keep up. Although I still can’t keep up with her dedication and speed, I feel that I have gasped all the basics that make up the project and could reproduce my work a lot faster and more efficiently. Overall, the project is somewhat coming to an end; just a few more pages need to be tweaked and then everything could use a proverbial coat of paint just for show.
After having a great time this semester, I’m looking forward to continuing my work with TWC in the future. Now that I’m over most of the awkward having-no-idea-what-to-do phase I think that I can contribute more and more to the project I’m involved on.
