21st April 2008, 04:29 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-04-21, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

- source: danbri on Flickr, CC
license

A fairly random mix this week. Above you can see Dan Brickley’s revision of the imagery that first saw light in Tim Berners-Lee’s slides in 1994. The original slides showed the connection between Web documents and things in the real world. Danbri’s added a nice twist in the thoughts of the people in the diagram - they don’t necessarily see the world in the same way. Fortunately Semantic Web technologies offer ways of saying things which allows for differing perspectives, and means to make use of coincidences between things different people have said. In recent months DBpedia has played a key role in the Linking Open Data cloud by providing common reference points derived from Wikipedia (check the podcast with Richard Cyganiak). This week sees the announcement of a set of new services around UMBEL, an upper-ish ontology which aims to provide a similar role.

There are a few more offerings for further up the Semantic Web stack from the W3C, and to demonstrate that such things aren’t necessarily incompatible with regular RDF development, Jim Hendler points to an OWL 2 profile that should be of interest to even the most web-fetishist audience: Towards RDFS 3.0 (or OWL 2 R Full).

A little trivia: subscribers to Planet RDF (one of the main sources for material here) may have noticed my personal blog hasn’t appeared recently, I’ve still got a few things to fix up after a bad server crash. This blog may not appear over there either for a little while as the Talis blogs are migrated over to being
WordPress-based. So the only conduit from Talis to Planet RDF this week is Ian’s blog, latest offering: The Terrible And Tragic Tale Of Brian The Snail. I suppose there’s always the magazine…