Remembering the Future

Last night I took my first look at Google Co-op, in particular the "Subscribed Links" feature which allows users to add services to Google search results.

The developer documentation outlines the process by which you can go about creating a service, which is simply a matter of creating a fairly simple XML configuration file.

The configuration breaks down into two key chunks: search descriptions ("ResultSpecs") and data ("DataObjects").

DataObjects have an identifier and a type, which is just a literal String. Identifiers must be unique across a type. Types can be "City" or "Radio Station" or something else meaningful to your service. The objects are basically hashes of name/value pairs. This allows you to expose arbitrary data to the Google Co-op servers in a reasonably structured format.

. . .

This got me to wondering whether I could feed Google Co-op DataObjects created by a SPARQL query, suitably transformed into the right format. It turns out you can.

Topics: RDF | Web2.0