The Semantic Web is generally considered the future, next step in the Evolution of the web. After the Semantic Web revolution, the web would be a much easier place to find information. Instead of search engines which currently look for patterns of words and content in pages, machines can understand the meaning of pages.

The semantic web revolution is now on, but IPB still fails to provide any parsable useable metadata. This modification will FOAF enable your board so you can take your first step into joining the revolution.

Interesting mod idea cowweb

Yes, explain more if you would.
How does this work?
What features or configuration will be available?

Looking for any suggestions? I have some things I was going to incorporate with an idea like this (could be the same idea actually, just not familiar with the terminology) i.e.

Each page should have customized metadata, not just pre-set meta tags in the board wrapper.
Also, I want to work with mod_rewrite to turn the pages into html (not really, but apparently at least) like so

http://board.com/forums/topic_54075.html

mod_rewrite would turn this into

http://board.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=54075

Not sure if that's above and beyond what you were going for here, but the more work YOU can do, the less I'd have to worry about.

This is just a basic implementation of FOAF So you'll only have metadata for the members, metadata for the whole board is going to be Phase 2

With the mod_rewrite mod, I've written this successfully, just fine tuning it a little and gonna post it to mod db

Awesome man....a buddy of mine just switching to IPB (http://belchfire.net) has done this thru his former system, and is looking to redo it for IPB (he knows a lot about apache, a little less on the php side but still enough to get what he wants to get done, done). I really want to do this, but

1) Not going to bother till 2.0
2) Will take a bit of research for me to do.

If you have a working copy almost ready, I'm really eager to see it.

And when you get a sample of this mod done (demo or something, I'd be interested in seeing). I assume this is modifying meta tags, so I'm curious to see what exactly it does to the tags oin certain situations.

I released the rewrite mod I wrote:
http://mods.invisionize.com/db/index.php/f/3582

I spent alot of time figuring out how to use mod_rewrite and stuff on my school website along time ago, and we managed to eliminate the use of alot of query strings through this method. It's all really a index.php?page=name URL, but the user sees the /section/page.html addresses. Works well with search engines and crawlers

RE: FOAFMod, the RDF Metadata itself will be help in another file which will generate the file. There will probably be something like <link rel="meta" href="foaf.php?id=1" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" />, with FOAF information determined from your profile.

Perhaps a good FOAF client in the future would connect to your website and perform some auto detection to determine whether you have your own FOAF file, and if applicable send you that. The small amount of FOAF information we can get out of IPB is pretty useful anyway, if we combine this information with sources like Friendster it's possible to build up quite a nice profile.

Intriguing.
Well, I'll check the mod_rewrite out soon. Like I said, I'll be working with 2.0 when I do, however the urls themselves are pretty much the same, so that's good. I'll let you know what changes are needed to upgrade to 2.0 so you can re-release it for 2.0 if you want. (assuming you aren't already working on that ).

Can't wait to see this one come about.

Interesting cow. I would rather see XFN than FoaF, but either is better than IPB provides itself.

XFN looks interesting. This mod will be a little more orientated towards metadata about one member, rather then people he/she knows. After all, there's no way we know which member knows who from the data IPB offers us. We can look at the buddy and blocked lists of PM, but these are infrequently used.

FOAF can be thought of a reformulation of vCard in XML/RDF, and that's the main purpose we'll be using it for. Supporting actual friends or XFN will require alot more modification of IPB all over the place

I'll post something later about my plans for using RDF metadata to describe BBs in general.

BTW, for those who still don't see why we need RDF and Semantic Web: I just got a popup on MSN Alerts/Messenger - Article on Neowin about future of search engines. The stuff described by Microsoft are already possible, and have been done. There's a language called RDQL which can be used to query RDF documents. It's basically SQL for RDF Whats RDF? Essentially a RDBMS for the web, which works on multiple servers

It'd be nice to get a version of IPB that fully suports this by rewriting all the links IPB displays in each of it's pages, but I guess that would be a huge task?

I see. You're taing a bit different route than I was getting from your post. I waas thinking about XFN from the board owner's perspective, whihc would be a bit easier to manage. I see where you're headed now though, and agree that FoaF is more suited to it.

I am really looking forward to this!