Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Starting web work

I've just joined the web team, fiddling with the code for the Tetherless World website and the semantic system it uses to dynamically generate web pages. The short version of it is when you request a page on Rob Greer instead of serving you a static prewritten HTML page the webpage does a little bit of magic. The webpage has a kind of template that it fills with data from our triple store, our semantic information database. It basically asks the database "What's Rob Greer's position title? His contact information, picture of him, etc.?" then uses this information to assemble a webpage in a manner much more aware of the fact that it's using actual information instead of just serving a document some human wrote.