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Three times a year DrupalCons bring the international Drupal community together and provide a great opportunity for coding on the next Drupal release, sharing knowledge or networking.

As previously announced on the IKS blog I’ve been recently working together with Stéphane Corlosquet on integrating the tools provided by the IKS project to do semantic content enhancements in Drupal as part of the IKS early adopter program.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project is an open source community which got funded by the EU to build an open and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced Content Management Systems. Thanks to IKS, open source projects like Apache Stanbol, VIE.js or Create.js got started. While VIE.js and Create.js are already on their way to Drupal 8 via the Spark initiative, our focus was on integrating Apache Stanbol with Drupal 7. In short, Apache Stanbol is a java web application that leverages tools like Apache Solr, Apache Tika or Apache OpenNLP to provide a set of reusable components for semantic content management via RESTful web services. On the front-end side, VIE.js (“Vienna IKS Editables”) is the JavaScript library for implementing decoupled Content Management Systems and semantic interaction in web applications.

While the conversion to full CRUD for entities and classed objects for Drupal 8 made good progress, we’ve not yet reached the goals of fully translatable entities and having a default entity serialization for import/export, content staging and web services. For those points we need to know what’s in an entity! Yes we can look up the fields, but there are also base entity properties and further stuff modules put on entities, which both are no fields so we do not know anything about them. That is what the new Entity Property API is supposed to change!