aRDF: a plugin to expose RDFa semantic information using Grails

For application developers data is the most important resource that can be found in the web, yet access to it is often subjected to barriers that hinder data reuse and interoperability. The semantic web brings with it the promise of a web of data (instead of the current web of documents) that will help to lower some of the barriers developers encounter when trying to gather data from multiple sources. Instead of having to resort to brittle screen-scrapping techniques, if data that is already present in web pages is encased in markup (such as RDFa) that makes it meaning explicit, developers can harvest that data directly and without ambiguities, turning human readable into machine readable data without the need to duplicate data. Since most of today's web development is done using web application frameworks that generate pages dynamically, placing that kind of markup unassisted is not feasible. As such there is the need for tools that extend the functionalities provided by web application frameworks in order to be able to add that kind of markup to a dynamically generated page, using the correct information for each item. In this paper we introduce one of those tools, aRDF, a plugin for the Grails web application framework that can be used to generate RDFa enhanced pages based on annotated underlying domain information.