Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-03-03, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

This week’s developments around the Semantic Web have been as diverse as one can hope for in such a distributed environment. The intermingling continues between new initiatives around Web 2.0-style social networking and DataPortability and the more established work on the social graph around FOAF. This has been highlighted by the colocation in Cork of the WebCamp Social Network Portability workshop (featuring a significant contigent of Semantic Web enthusiasts) with BlogTalk 2008. Such crossovers aren’t without a little friction – see for example Tom Heath’s pushback regarding the simplicity of microformats.

Highlight of the week has to be Paul Miller’s interview with the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee – “Semantic Web is open for business” as Paul puts it over on the new ZDNet Semantic Web blog.

The specification glacier continues onwards, but developers are quick to experiment and deploy. The Semantic Web’s query language SPARQL only became a W3C Recommendation this January, yet already it’s been turned back-to-front. The RDF-in-HTML language RDFa and Simple Knowledge Organization System SKOS (for taxonomies and the like) have seen fresh publications this week.

Folks who have seen these posts before may have noticed I recently stopped making any effort with the Events section. There are simply too many events covering the Semantic Web and related technologies to keep track. Best bet for announcements and Calls for Papers right now is the semantic-web@w3.org mailing list.

Not forgetting a belated Happy Birthday to the Linking Open Data Project.

In the Media

• Podcast: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Talks about the Semantic Web, transcript – responses: Technorati,Techmeme
• Diagram: The Linking Open Data dataset cloud – with new additions from AudioScrobbler/Last.FM, QDOS, Flickr exporter and an major update for DBpedia
• Collection: 302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts!
• Mixed media: see WebCamp SNP and BlogTalk 2008, WebCamp Social Network Portability group, some photos, BlogTalk aggregated

Docs

• Semantic Web: Dull as Dishwater edition
• SPARQL Intro, Recipes
• 99 Wikipedia Sources Aiding the Semantic Web
• Talis Platform site makeover including news, plus n² – “a kind of technical sister blog to Nodalities“
• CardDAV – DAV WTF?
• ¿De Dónde Vienen los Agentes de Software?
• RDFa goes to Last Call
• SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer
• Social Software Building Blocks, Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter.
• DataPortability presentation summary, Don’t get the Semantic Web? You will after this
• Microformat Authoring Not Necessarily Easy – see also Validating microformats, timbl: “how about writing a microformat validator that checks the @profile?… it could report “you don’t have a valid microformat” how about adding the @profile..“, microformats to-do
• XHTML Vocabulary namespace
• Sometimes It’s Just Semantics
• XML10
• FindingResourceDescriptions
• Cognition – “parser for metadata embedded in HTML”
• Sidewinder and the need for a semantic web applications framework

Software News

• Anzo.*: Building Semantic Applications in Heterogeneous Environments
• RAP – RDF API for PHP 0.9.6, announcement – includes lots of linked data goodness
• Sparqling a [XMPP] nodelist List
• sparqling international calling codes
• Lqraps! Reverse SPARQL
• xOperator and Groovy scripts
• Ruby and RDF – Beauty and the Beast?
• Contexts in rdflib
• DB Tune Jamendo SPARQL endpoint documentation
• FOAFing the Music
• urires.xsl / URI Reference Parsing Tests
• Peep – an Open Twitter Server, How to Build a Twitter Agent
• Pownce API v2
• Shindigging – “Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification“
• Ocsigen – “is a research project aiming at developing new programming techniques for the Web”
• Desktop VFS – “…will utilize URIs for referencing files and folders”
• Country information from DBpedia (showing results of SPARQL query in Drupal 6.x with the RDF API)

Events etc.

• SemTech conference 2008
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org archives

Miscellany

• Raising the stakes – in Net Neutrality
• Biographicon Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses
• My 23andMe DNA Results
• SaaS and the global virtual stack, Eight
  reasons SaaS will surge in 2008, Your Data in the Cloud – URL-based computing, SimpleDB, Astoria, etc.
• Microsoft Standardizes on AtomPub for Web Services and Other Stories
• SimpleDB did screw up
• Liberating your Enterprise Assets to the Web
• Introducing Conveyor – a “distributed, rewindable, virtual queue server”
• KML: HTML for the Geoweb
• Google Health, a first look
• Data Mining and Visualization
• Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?
• Distributed cognition
• SLOOH – live online robotic space observatory
• loldogs

Quote of the Week

Show it don’t say it!

- danbri in Social Network Portability (slides, PDF)

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail me or use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!