Semantic Web dream with Elgg

In continuation to my previous post here, I've decided to come up with a new idea. Something, that Elgg and its community wants, sooner or later on the web. Allow me to introduce you to, "Elgg Graph". A graph that explains users, their posts, comments, activity, everything on the Elgg community anywhere around the world.

Basically, this is what I've in store for Elgg (during and post GSoC). Elgg Graph, is a local entity (site specific) that explains all the objects and their relationships. Probably we'll try to add a feature to visualize it by the admin at the admin panel (not now), like LinkedIn Inmaps, etc.

Once the graph is perfected, and things are set up, we need to build a solid strong API on top of it. Graph does not allow direct editing. We need to provide a web service on top of the existing structure to modify the content, or it can always be done online through web interface by the users.

Once the Elgg Graph with its API is done, only now we would be able to provide a perfect social application development platform on Elgg.

Some time later, we can try to set up a global repo, for the community to share their graph, and establish inter graph communication (this is when we provide true semantics to the end user) between them. This repo, can consume the graph in a format of Semantic Web like RDF, etc. Hence, with the permission of the site administrators, we can contribute the content to the LinkedData, which can be consumed by other apps and websites on the web, to increase their productivity for the user.

Of all this, I'm planning to implement the Elgg Graph, API, and provide web services to the basic graph operations for this GSoC. There was a project idea in Elgg Ideas page for RDF kind of stuff also, may be someone is already working on it. I'll try to implement the rest post GSoC 2011.

The idea or the dream, i've tried to explain is in very high level. Once I start working on the various aspects of these, I'll decompose them and keep you posted :)

Any comments, or feedback on this would be highly appreciated. As I mentioned earlier, I'm new to Elgg. I'm trying to discover new and interesting aspects of it, almost every day. If I'm missing out anything here, plz correct me.

Update: I'm also going to work on RDF content export for Elgg, with Jena TDB and Joseki for SPARQL end point.

- Ashwanth Kumar