2008 - in progress

Lorenzo De Tomasi has designed the information architecture and the interface of an online community on collaborative cartography, that permits to young people from all Europe to edit contents and organize them geographically on interactive maps.

The project has been ideated by Lunaria and funded with support from the European Commission (Youth in action program).

The website has been developed by Marco Ridoni and  Lynx and release under a Gnu/Gpl license.

Everyone is invited to contribute new features and knowledge to Oryx. The project is hosted as a Google Code project under MIT license.

1. Open the page-template Page with category and save it from your browser (File > Save page as…).
2. Rename the file wp-page_category.txt in wp-page_category.php.
3. Open the template Navigate posts and save it from your browser (File > Save page as…).
4. Rename the file navigate_posts.txt in navigate_posts.php.
5. Using an free software ftp client (like Filezilla) copy both the files wp-page_category.php and navigate_posts.php into your wp-content/themes/<your theme folder>/.
6. Login at your website and write a new page.
7. Select the Page with category template as page-template.
8. Create a custom field with displayed_categories as Key and the numeric id of the category you want to display as Value.
9. Publish the page.
10. Visit the page you have just published.

License

©2008 by Lorenzo De Tomasi. Copyleft/Some rights reserved. The php code has been released under a Gnu/Gpl 3.0 license.

Future improvements

• Make the <!--more--> work. [Can you help to understand the problem? Thanks]
• Set the number of post listed for each page, using pagination buttons. If no value is set, display the default number of posts.
• Display more than one category at time (for example books and dvds), using comma separated numeric category-ids (131, 12, 36).
• Check if displayed_categories is set.
• Check if categories exist.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

CC founding board member and MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson sends this message:

Dear Staff and Board,

I’m writing with some great news:

Today, the technical specification RDFa in XHTML Syntax and Processing was formally accepted as a Web Consortium Technical Recommendation by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.

Those the words might not mean much to any but the geekiest of us — but this is a big deal.

Creative Commons was a early adopter of Semantic Web standards. And yet, while the Semantic Web provided RDF as a standard for expressing metadata, it did not provide a standard for how that metadata should be integrated into ordinary Web pages.

The original concept of the Semantic Web did not encompass the notion that ordinary Web pages would be augmented with machine-readable metadata. Even today, that notion remains controversial. One considerable faction still holds that HTML should be purely a formatting language with no provision for any semantic information at all. Other factions, like microformats community, advocate metadata standards that do not integrate well into RDF and general Semantic Web applications.

CC licensing was the first use of the Web to envision Web publishers augmenting their pages with small amounts of machine-readable markup: the CC licensing attributes. It was our desire achieve this consistently with the Semantic Web that led to our involvement with the Web standards community; and the need to advocate for such a standard was why CC joined the Web Consortium in the first place.

RDFa is the standard that has emerged from this effort. RDFa is a general mechanism for expressing machine-readable attributes on Web pages in a way that is integrates with HTML. The most obvious example for us is the Creative Commons Rights Expression language (ccREL) — a machine-readable way to express CC licensing.

W3C’s adoption today of the RDFa recommendation solidifies the technical underpinning of ccREL and opens the door to the development and widespread support for CC-compliant tools on the Web.

There are many people who deserve credit for RDFa. Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler certainly get kudos for their consistent support and development of the CC infrastructure to emphasize RDFa and ccREL.

But the lion’s share of the credit goes to Ben Adida, CC’s W3C representative, who led this effort creatively and tirelessly. Ben’s leadership in the technical design of RDFa and the negotiations and refinements to bring RDFa all the way through the complex Web standards process has been an effort of more than five years.

This work on RDFa not only has major benefit to CC, but it’s a significant example CC providing technical leadership in Web community and a contribution that will have implications far beyond CC’s own applications.

Ben deserves our sincerest thanks and congratulations.

== Hal

(Also check out Hal’s starring role in the new Jesse Dylan video about Creative Commons, A Shared Culture.)

Congratulations and thanks to Ben and everyone else who has worked so hard on this effort for so many years.

If you’re a web developer, check out RDFa and ccREL. A great place to start is Ben’s Introduction to ccREL talk from our first CC technology summit held in June (slides and video available at the link; also check out the CFP for our upcoming December tech summit at MIT). Ben also recommends a new post from the founder of Drupal on Drupal, the semantic web and search.

Otherwise (and even if you are a web developer), the best way to support this work is by supporting Creative Commons. Our annual fundraising campaign just kicked off yesterday, so now is an excellent time to give.

Thanks!

Mike Linksvayer, RDFa now a W3C recommendation; message from Hal Abelson, October 16th, 2008