Semantic skills
A fairly significant milestone has just been crossed (actually, a week ago, but I’ve been too busy to blog) with my character generator - all skill information is now represented in RDF, parsed by Redland and Sparta.
Skills were chosen to go first since they have the smallest number of properties - just the ones common to all rules and a key ability score. I knocked together a small Python program to generate the RDF, using Redland+Sparta for reading and writing files.
Patching the campaign reader to load (only) the skill data from an RDF file while the remainder continues loading from XML was slightly trickier, but helped immensely by Sparta’s pythonic API.
This is really cool to me for a number of reasons. I have a specific desktop application that gets measurable decrease in code complexity by adopting RDF; I can move to distributing rules across multiple files without any extra coding; I’ve successfully migrated an XML-centric workflow to an RDF-centric workflow with minimal effort; and I can use OWL to interface to other, interesting vocabularies such as FOAF. One of my longtime goals is to keep track of fictional social webs with social networking software.