mardi 30 septembre 2003

Zope and ZC Power Boston Globe The news is officially out: the Boston Globe chose Zope and Zope Corporation to power a magnificent, and magnificently big, website. Scroll down the press release for the line saying "a new content management system built using the Zope4Media open-source solution from Zope Corporation." Note also that this site is part of the New York Times Company. That's some big stuff we're talking about here. Well-deserved congrats go out to ZC for a marquee site that sets the high water mark for Zope. 2:55:27 PM   comment []

Mucho Mo' Micro Shelley Powers is the author of "Practical RDF" and an extremely articulate articulator of the inarticulable Semantic Web. She wrote an interesting essay a while back about the Two Tim's argument (Bray, Berners-Lee) over meaning and identity. (Suggestion: skip the two Tim's and just read Shelley's article.) Shelley writes about the use of FOAF in weblogging: "It is a microcosm of the Semantic Web, with its rich possibilities and its many ambiguities and misunderstandings." Lately I've been interested in an even micro-er microcosm. The world of Zope is pretty darn big. Too big, it seems, for the resources that help us navigate the world of Zope. In most places we look, it seems we are going backwards on efforts to organize and manage our information, which is pretty ironic for a content management project. The problem, of course, isn't the software. It's the use of the software and the process of organization. First, the world of Zope falls into the same trap as the rest of content management. It thinks we are back in the days of mainframes. Most content management approaches an application by forcing everything to come live in one place, with few meaningful connections to information lying elsewhere. The second problem is that this is open source, and prone to challenges regarding volunteer time and company time. While Shelley's microcosm is an application (FOAF), I'm curious about a microcosm of a community. Can we practice Shelley's lessons, and FOAF's lessons, to solve the problem of unfindable information in the world of Zope? For the problem isn't lack of content. Boy, there's lots of good content on all the sites in the world of Zope. Unfortunately, we rely on a center that is in decline. I've become curious about the opportunity: could we "practice RDF" to bootstrap a semantic community and avert the problems of a cathedral-approach to community information? I'll try in future posts to put some specifics behind the meaning of both "semantic community" and "bootstrapping". Both are terms that I've written lots of notes about and talked about with others. As with everything regarding the Semantic Web, getting from stratosphere to terra firma is the challenge. 2:32:51 PM   comment []