Harpers.org: a Semantic Webish site for Harpers Magazine

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Harpers.org a Semantic Web(ish) site for
Harpers Magazine

• Paul Ford
• Associate Web Editor, Harpers.org
• ford_at_harpers.org

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Harpers is

• A magazine of literature, politics, culture, and
  the arts published continuously from 1850
  
• A small non-profit

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Available content

• The Weekly Review, an emailed summary of world
  events, from 2000
  
• The Harpers Index, a statistical portrait of the
  world, from 1998
  
• Public domain, scanned-in archives from
  1850-1982
  
• Readings
• Occasional features

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And thats it.

• Maybe full text of issues will be offered
  someday, but not soon. So
  
• How do we get more value out of limited content?

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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

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A quick demo

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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

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Markup

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

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Markup

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

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Markup

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

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Markup

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

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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.

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Conditionals ugly, but simple

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

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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.

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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

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Hard, then easy

• Hard to get started (lots of events, facts, and
  links)
  
• Easy to keep going, if you dont mind the markup
  and use a good text editor

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Tools used

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

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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.)

?
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For free

• From 300 individual pages
• To 1100 pages of remixed content all unique
  and relevant
  
• And Google-friendly

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And also for free

• Semantically relevant in-site advertising, if we
  want it
  
• Topic-sorted, reusable content
• Permanent, readable URIs

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Do people get it?

• Some do, and others just navigate the site as
  usual
  
• Harpers was fine with the learning curve
• Odd but useful Gawker

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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

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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

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Next?
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Make it pretty

• Redesign
• Hide some of the navigation
• Turn links on and off

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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

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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
• ?

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