Harpers.org: a Semantic Web(ish) site for Harper’s Magazine

Paul FordAssociate Web Editor, Harpers.orgford@harpers.org

Harper’s is…

- A magazine of literature, politics, culture, and the arts published continuously from 1850

- A small non-profit

Available content

- The Weekly Review, an emailed summary of world events, from 2000

- The Harper’s Index, a statistical portrait of the world, from 1998

- Public domain, scanned-in archives from 1850-1982

- Readings- Occasional features

And that’s it.

- Maybe full text of issues will be offered someday, but not soon. So…

- How do we get more value out of limited content?

Solution

- Hack up the what we have into bits by content type, then…

- Reassemble it according to link targets…

- Which are arranged in a taxonomy…

- Creating a very small “Semantic Web” for Harpers.org

A quick demo…

- >>>

How it works

- Simple set of ontological relationships (partOf, supervisorOf)

- Taxonomy of content- & narrative content

- that is split into smaller pieces

- & links into the taxonomy

Markup

- Text: “Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z. On Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.”

Markup

<event> Country Y announced that it had

cut off relations with country Z.</event>

<event>On Wednesday, something

happened to persons W and X.</event>

Markup

<event on=“2004-03-12” id=“24848”>

Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z.

</event>

Markup

<event on=“2004-03-12” id=“24848”>

<link to=“#CountryY”>Country Y</link> announced that it had cut off relations with <link to=“#CountryZ”>country Z</link>.

</event>

Conditionals

- Some text required conditional markup

- Text: “Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z, and on Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.”

Conditionals: ugly, but simple<event>Country Y announced that it had cut off

relations with country Z <cond is=“id”>, and</cond> <cond not=“id”>.</cond></event><event> <cond is=“id”>on</cond> <cond not=“id”>On</cond>on Wednesday, something happened

to persons X and Y.</event>

Conditionals: ugly, but simple- Narrative version

- Country Y announced that it had cut off relations with country Z, and on Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.

- Timeline-friendly version- Country Y announced that it

had cut off relations with country Z.

- On Wednesday, something happened to persons X and Y.

All of it gets slurped up

- And turned into a set of triples

- Then processed in-memory- With HTML pages spit out

as a result

Hard, then easy

- Hard to get started (lots of events, facts, and links)

- Easy to keep going, if you don’t mind the markup and use a good text editor

Tools used

- emacs, vi, bbedit- XSLT2.0 (SAXON)- CVS

Why not RDF?

- Not right for redundant content and conditionals

- Easy enough to transform arbitrary structured XML into RDF with XSLT, as needed

- (Or into RSS1.0, RSS2.0, Atom, etc.)

?

For free…

- From 300 individual pages…

- To 1100 pages of “remixed” content – all unique and relevant

- And Google-friendly

And also for free…

- Semantically relevant in-site advertising, if we want it

- Topic-sorted, reusable content

- Permanent, readable URIs

Do people get it?

- Some do, and others just navigate the site as usual

- Harper’s was fine with the learning curve

- “Odd but useful” – Gawker

Results

- Uptick in traffic and subscription revenues

- Low cost of maintenance- Ever-increasing database of

facts and events – adding one Weekly Review adds value to 50 different pages

- Happy client

Why the SemWeb(ish) framework?

- Leaves plenty of room to grow- Web-only content- Full text of issues- Subscriber services- Etc

- Take advantage of new SemWeb tools- Incorporate RDF sources into the

taxonomy- Anticipate Semantic Web browsers

Next?

Make it pretty

- Redesign- Hide some of the

navigation- Turn links on and off

Make it scale

- Currently maxes out at about 20-30 megs of content, due to limits of in-memory DOM representation (10-12x XML document size)

- Use a publicly available storage layer (Kowari, Jena, etc)

- Go triple-crazy

Make it easy to query and navigate

- “Show me everything related to George Bush and Iraq.”

or- “Show me everything related

to politicians and the Middle East.”

- New navigation- ?