The short story

The rdfhomepage project was started in 2005 by Sven Schwarz and was designed according to the following goals:

• Concentrate as much as possible on content, (meta-)information and relations only.
• Layout is secondary and should not be rendered manually in HTML by the user. Instead, this is done automatically by rdfhomepage. A good style should already be available right at the beginning.
• Navigation and interesting links should be separated from the content. It should be able to modify these links in a minute.
• All interesting and homepage relevant data stored already somewhere should be integrated into the homepage. You should never need to enter an information more than once. As our research group heavily relies on RDF/S, the incorporation of RDF/S is a mayor goal.

• Besides all the nice words above, every user is an indidual, which (unfortunately?) likes to have his own style on his homepage. So, rdfhomepage would never make it far without the possibility to adapt it to match the user's own preferences and style. We therefore rely on XHTML and CSS for rendering of information.
• Adaptation going beyond mere CSS hacking needs for modifications of rdfhomepage's source code. We chose PHP as the one and only programming language for rdfhomepage. Moreover the rdfhomepage sources are open-source. Feel free to use, read, and adapt its code to match your special needs.

Style and look & feel

• The initial style coming with rdfhomepage is adapted from the homepage of "Thomas Roth-Berghofer":​http://thomas.roth-berghofer.de/. That style was originally designed by "Stefan Schulz":​http://www.wysart.de/.
• You may want to create your own homepage.css file to match your personal style.

rdfhomepage modeling

• Leo Sauermann created the initial RDF schema for rdfhomepage.
• This schema has already been modified and enhanced several times. It may still change in the near future, however, we hope to fixate the schema soon.

PHP scripts

• Most of the PHP scripts and work needed to integrate RDF data into the homepage was done by Gunnar Grimnes.
• He used RAP:http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/ (an RDF API for PHP) together with his "RDF Template Generator":​http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~grimnes/dev/rdftempgen/ to glue PHP and RDF together very nicely. Accessing RDF in rdfhomepage is as easy as a method call.
• Integration of our organizational structure (modeled in RDF of course) has been done by Leo, Günther, and Gunnar.
• Most of the cumbersome and picky PHP hacking needed to ensure configurable, consistent, and stable processing of rdfhomepage has been done by Günther Noack

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