Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By : Shu-Wai Chow
Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By: Shu-Wai Chow

Overview of this book

A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources into an integrated experience. This book is your entryway to the world of mashups and Web 2.0. You will create PHP projects that grab data from one place on the Web, mix it up with relevant information from another place on the Web and present it in a single application. This book is made up of five real-world PHP projects. Each project begins with an overview of the technologies and protocols needed for the project, and then dives straight into the tools used and details of creating the project: Look up products on Amazon.Com from their code in the Internet UPC database A fully customized search engine with MSN Search and Yahoo! A personal video jukebox with YouTube and Last.FM Deliver real-time traffic incident data via SMS and the California Highway Patrol! Display pictures sourced from Flickr in Google maps All the mashup applications used in the book are built upon free tools and are thoroughly explained. You will find all the source code used to build the mashups used in this book in the code download section for this book.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Resource Description Framework (RDF)


Recall from Chapter 3, we described RSS 1.1 as being RDF-based. What exactly is RDF? Many call RDF “metadata about data” and then go on to describe how it has evolved beyond that. While RDF and its usage has certainly evolved, it is important to not to forget the “metadata about data” aspect because it captures the essence of what RDF is.

The purpose of RDF is to describe a web resource, that is, to describe something on the Internet. For example, if a shopping website lists the price of something, what exactly is a price? Is it in American Dollars? Mexican Pesos? Russian Rubles? For a website, what exactly is a timestamp? Should a machine parser treat a timestamp in 12-hour notation different from a timestamp in 24-hour notation? XML, at a very high level, was supposed to allow groups to standardize on a transaction format. Implementation details were left to the parties of interests because XML is just a language. RDF is the next evolution of that original...