Looking to the future of the Grand Rapids WiFi site, I hope to see it become part of an integrated set of local websites supporting and promoting community development and local business. Geolocation seems to be the topic du jour, and while the site has for several months featured geodata about all of its locations the time seemed right to develop it further.
Today I’ve been adding RDF representations of almost all the data on the site. I’ve extended the RDF descriptions of each location to list all the comments on that location. The vocabulary for that is one I found over at FilmTrust and it means that almost all the useful content of the site can now be represented using RDF.
To tie it all together I’ve added an RDF/XML index of the site so that agents can easily get a complete list of WiFi locations listed on the site. Obviously a spider could have worked its way through the site and found all the data, but this removes a hurdle.
It’s remarkably easy to add RDF representations of data on a database-driven site such as this one. There was some tweaking to do, but mostly the work was constructing and validating a new set of templates. Now I need to start harnessing the new power.