[Opensim-dev] Introduction of a sitemap style system for users and land

[Haravikk]

> On 3 Jul 2018, at 22:24, Alan Johnston <alan.johnston at allvirtualsocial.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello I am Alan as some of you already know, I am looking to create a new search engine that will be just for virtual worlds. Im  looking to create a crawler that will look at the grids website, and also look at a few other bits for the grid, so then people can search for things in the virtual world, and one thing I’m looking to introduce Is a sitemap style users system and also land, I’m working on the schema for it, but it would look a lot like sitemap schema, this is something I’m looking into making, as some of you know the current sitemap schema is as follows
> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
> <url>
> <loc>https://www.example.com/something</loc>
> <priority>1.0</priority>
> <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
> <lastmod>2018-07-03</lastmod>
> </url>
> </urlset>
> And that it is has a maximum of 500 URL’s or 50MB in size, if it is larger it is subset with a sitemap-index.xml which has the schema of 
> <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
> <sitemap>
> <loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml</loc>
> <lastmod>2018-07-03</lastmod>
> </sitemap>
> </sitemapindex>
> 
> My proposal which I’m working on would follow this system loosely it would have these as the base of the system, and would be easy to create them from websites, I have yet to sort out the full proposal and wondered if the land section could be implemented into opensim core its self (as there is no profile for users with a web interface in the core, and a far as I can tell there might not be which I understand), I am working on the schema at present and will be looking to have a full proposal of the schema in the next few days, I am hopeing to have both schemas done in the next few days. 
> Would this be something that can be implemented into opensim core so then it would help the search engine which at present would be mine but could be introduced into other search engines aswell, I am working on my search engine as we speak and also the bot crawler, I will update everyone with the schema and information on the schema soon. 
> 
> Alan Johnston

I'm not familiar enough to comment on specifics on the OpenSim side, but the idea you're talking about reminded me a great deal of some coursework I did at university about the semantic web; it's all XML based and intended for the kind of open data consumption you seem to be describing. In fact it was basically intended as a means of exposing raw data for search engines.

Unfortunately it hasn't really taken off in the way that was originally envisioned, as regular search engines got a lot better at inferring relations from data on web-pages, but the data formats and concepts might still be worth considering as a means of providing the data, rather than using sitemaps.

The Wikipedia article covers it all very well, and links to RDF and OWL (the main data formats) with good examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework>

Anyway, like I say, it was just the first thing I thought of when I read what you wanted to do, because you mention having a specific search engine.

One advantage of sitemaps however is that, provided every URL has an actual web-page, then any existing search engine ought to be able index everything given a suitable sitemap as an entry point, but on the other hand, semantic data is intended to describe only what you define, so the added structure and formality may be a factor; i.e- a sitemap could embed a URL to anything inside it, but a semantic document would be invalid if it points to something it shouldn't. Semantic document do tend to be more verbose than sitemaps, but then they're not necessarily intended to be modified manually, and I assume your idea is to have OpenSim or a plugin generate the data?

Maybe I'm thinking about it too academically, but I thought I'd mention it. At the very least it's an interesting technology not a lot of people know about and which I like (despite hating the class that covered it) 😀

- Haravikk