Drupal 7 semantic by default, when will Alfresco follow?

My university friend Stéphane Corlosquet has spent the last few months adding a very exciting feature to Drupal for its imminent next release: Drupal 7 will expose your website's structural information as RDFa, by default!

This has huge implications. Drupal being one of the most popular CMS, it handles a significant proportion of the Web's information. So Drupal 7 will effectively make the Semantic Web much bigger. Furthermore, a website's manager will now be able to define the website's ontology based on existing ontologies, which means each Drupal website will now be both a consumer as well as a producer of semantic information.

For website owners, an immediate result is that their website will be better understood by Google. But the Semantic Web is much more than an SEO trick. It is a way to make information more useful, more exact, and to make it understandable by computers.

So how long before Alfresco follows? The open-source Enterprise Content Management System should make sure the content it manages is understandable by both humans and machines. A company's way to structure information should not be kept in the Data Dictionary, it should be exposed as RDF Schema. The metadata, including aspects, should be accessible via RDF in addition to the usual REST/Java/JavaScript/JCR/CMIS APIs.

Authorized trainer of Alfresco WCM

I am now an authorized trainer of Alfresco WCM! I am officially authorized to teach developers how to implement solutions using the Alfresco Web Content Management system. Here is the detailed review:

Nicolas was assigned a difficult topic to deliver, but delivered it well and confidently. He clearly has a good grasp of the material and is very knowledgable on WCM. He provided a good overview and delivered information without reading the slides.

Nicolas is comfortable presenting in English and gave full and detailed descriptions of some complex AVM concepts. Nicolas answered questions competently and should be able to train the complete course well and enthusiastically.

Reviewed by Ben Hagan and Carlos Miguens (Alfresco Software, Inc.)

Alfresco's CEO in Tokyo

Today I attended the Alfresco seminar organized by aegif, at the 49th floor of the Mori Tower. Alfresco's CEO John Powell exposed the strength of the open source Enterprise Content Management system, and several Japanese integration companies demonstrated their Alfresco-based offerings.