SPARQL feature request: submitted.

One of the distingishing features of the Texas A&M homepage is that there is more than one event on the homepage. That’s a hint that the pages main role is navigational.

It should be simple enough to test in the app whether 0,1 or more than 1 event is present and if so, return null – signalling that no enhancement is possible. The intent of the application is to expose information about specific events, it cannot aid in navigation and should not try to – that’s your job

I tested this approach by searching for pages without VCal RDFa that matched my URL pattern and you seem to handle it OK, though its difficult to tell since the index itself is a little patchy anyway. I have similar checks in place for e.g. unrecognised date formats and foreign languages which I haven’t tried to support.

Another approach might be to insist on a dc:subject or foaf:primaryTopic predicate relating the page to the event, though this would make the slide share idea a little complex, and also your dataRSS conversion adds dc:subject anyway so it would be hard to tell the difference at the moment.

Feature request: SPARQL support! Crafting Xpaths over your bespoke dataRSS format is tricky!

I think your implementation is very solid. But as you say, a generic VCal Enhanced Result app is tricky. Partly because Enhanced Results can’t act on * — but the other big problem is that SearchMonkey doesn’t take into account the user’s intent.

We actually have a lot of event data in our index right now thanks to VCal and hCalendar — an embarrassment of riches, actually. For feelitlive.com/events, those pages are really *about* an event, and so it seems reasonable to show the user calendar information 100% of the time. But the trickier case is a page like, say, http://tamu.edu. The vast majority of searchers who see this result are doing a navigational query, they just want to find the Texas A&M website. But there’s some small fraction who actually *will* be interested in Texas A&M’s calendar data.

This is a longwinded way of saying that SearchMonkey currently doesn’t do a great job of supporting “Generic Vocabulary” apps. We either need to A) add user intent to the SearchMonkey devtool, or B) create our own generic apps, and tell the dev community, “Here’s the Yahoo! default VCal handler! If you don’t like it, please feel free to override it and build a custom presentation for your own site.”

BTW, I think your app is almost certainly gallery-worthy for FeelItLive.com specifically. I don’t run the gallery approval process, but if for some reason it gets rejected, please email me at the address I supplied and I’ll help you tweak the app and get it approved.

Best,

Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

It’s a shame Slideshare don’t allow you to publish VCal data on the event the slides were shown at. Using an enhanced result like the would help people to find the slides they saw. Adding support for the event ontology factor predicate would allow the slides themselves to be depicted in the result using the existing thumbnail.

+ Digg (for example, see http://digg.com/d1nhP0)
+ Slideshare (e.g., http://www.slideshare.net/mediasemanticweb/linked-data-michael-hausenblas-2009-03-05)

BTW, I’m using RDFa+vCard on my ‘person ID page’ at http://sw-app.org/mic.xhtml, which, btw, nicely gets transformed into a format that you can directly use in you PIM or mail client (when you click on the business card icon).

Cheers,
Michael