Building semantic content models in Drupal 8

Slides are available online: http://slides.com/scor/semantic-cm-drupal-8-barcelona-2015/

Drupal is closer than any other CMS to realizing the promise of the semantic web now that RDFa from schema.org is in Drupal 8 core. Schema.org-based content exposes the structure of your content right in the HTML, enabling things like more powerful search, smarter machine learning and more efficient data migration.

Until recently building database schemas and creating content models have been two seperate disciplines but they are beginning to come together. Schema.org and Drupal 8 are accelerating that process. We believe that content strategists should be able to do the hands-on work of building their content models in the application where the content will be created, but to do that they need a simple, virtually automatic, process that doesn't require the help of a developer. RDF UI in Drupal 8 (schema.org kickstart in D7) is a big step in that direction.

In addition to RDFUI, configuration management and features module in Drupal 8 enable the creation of “content model templates”, for example a “music site” which might contain “Song”, “Artist”, “Album” and “Concert” entities, with entity references, as well as views for things like: Songs in Album, Songs by Artist, Upcoming Concerts" etc. Here we'll discuss ongoing work to make these even more usable.

This session introduces content strategists to Schema.org and RDFUI, and demonstrates how they can be used to easily and quickly create schema.org-mapped content types and features. Our hope is that when content strategists have "primitives" like these to build on and customize they will be empowered to extend them, leading to a kind of marketplace of base content models, all mapped to schema.org, that will enrich the semantic web through viral growth.

This session is an updated version of a talk originally presented at BADcamp 2013 to a standing-room only audience and was featured in DrupalEasy podcast 143.