Using Semantics – The Basic Meeting List Toolbox

Try The New Semantic Workshop!

Accessing the Semantic Output of the BMLT

The semantic output is accessed by the Root Server, not the Satellite Servers.

Unless you are a BMLT Server Administrator, you have probably experienced the BMLT from the point of view of a satellite admin (a BMLT user, as opposed to an administrator).

Not to worry. There is no need for any kind of special permissions or logins to use the semantic interface. All you need is the URL to the BMLT Root Server.

In most cases, you already have this URL. It is the one that Meeting List Administrators use to log in and edit their meeting lists. It will show the blue login screen with white lettering. For example, the Greater New York Root Server URL is http://bmlt.newyorkna.org/main_server/. In some cases, it may include the “index.php” file, like so: http://bmlt.newyorkna.org/main_server/index.php. This is not necessary. Your starting point is the directory, so don’t include any PHP (or HTML, in some cases where the Webmaster may have used some technical trickery) files.

Examples

For the examples here, I’ll use the Greater new York Region Root Server. The GNYR is the “home field” for the BMLT, and usually has the most current release.

As stated above, the URL for the GNYR Root Server is:

http://bmlt.newyorkna.org/main_server/

This will be the starting point for the semantic URLs that I will construct as examples.

Directories

The semantic output is accessed by executing files in special subdirectories of the root server. These all live under the “client_interface” subdirectory (http://bmlt.newyorkna.org/main_server/client_interface). the directories for each of the semantic outputs are:

Note that the first three links didn’t return much of anything, and the last three links returned fairly massive files. That’s because we haven’t done anything to specify exactly what we want from them. We’ll cover that in the next page.