Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-04-14, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL

Most of the visible activity around Semantic Web technologies for the last year or so has been around the lower regions of the layer cake, in other words on the Giant Global Graph. This Web side of the Semantic Web has made strong steps forward recently thanks largely to the availability of the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language alongside initiatives around Linked Data. But work has been continuing on the semantics further up the stack, away from the glitz of Web 2.0. A marker point was reached in those regions this week with the announcement that the work around revisions to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) would be rebranded from OWL 1.1 to OWL 2. This coincided with the publication by the W3C OWL Working Group of three new documents (and the republication of three others). Although a lot of the demand in this area comes from specialist fields such as in the life sciences, the languages are applicable to any domain, and generally interoperable with RDF and other Web technologies. While on the surface such specifications can seem seriously esoteric, with the recent growth of related techniques in tools such as business rules engines it’s likely only a matter of time before OWL gets considerably wider attention. So even if you’re proud to be considered a Web Fetishist, now is probably a good time to read the Primer, and maybe have a play with OwlSight – a new release of which came today.

The big news for Web developers at large this week was the announcement of the Google App Engine – a hosted container for (Python) Web applications, backed by potentially massive storage facilities along with interop with Googles other systems. Reaction in the blogosphere has been varied, with many developers delighting in having a new toy to play with, business analysts making comparisons with Amazon’s services, other developers grumbling about it being another closed system.  While arguably there’s little new here in technical terms (c.f. Ning, Facebook, Bungee Connect, SimpleDB), the simple fact that it comes from Google makes it a potential game changer. Removing the need to worry about back-end infrastructure is certainly a step forward, though whether the approach taken by Google will merely lead an increased surfeit of shiny Web 2.0-style apps with questionable utility remains to be seen. An imaginative avenue to more interesting apps is suggested by Leigh Dodds in Google AppEngine for Personal Web Presence? Early adopters of the Web rolled up their sleeves to demonstrate what was possible on their own sites (even before animated gifs came along), so perhaps advocates of things like the Web of Data, opening the social graph and DataPortability should begin at home too…

In the Media

• Podcast: A Chat with Dave Beckett
• Podcasts: DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast, Episode 2
• Video: Nova Spivack, A Few Predictions for the Near Future
• Video: Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0
• Presentations: POWDER Outreach
• The Economist: Start making sense

Docs

• OWL 2 Web Ontology Language – 6 new Working Drafts:
  • Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
  • Model-Theoretic Semantics
  • Mapping to RDF Graphs
  • XML Serialization
  • Profiles
  • Primer
• Semantic Web Semantics: Arcane, but Important
• Semantic What?
• Linked Data Principles Revisited
• Cool URIs in a RESTful World
• Identity Theft: It’s Not Your Problem
• 12 Things You Should Know About REST and WOA
• Planning a Semantic Web site
• Semantics in the wild: new jOWL wine Demo
• W3C’s Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group Drafts Show Power of Data Integration
• Digging RDFa
• NSFW: Not Safe For Work
  - GRDDL Profile updated
• HTML5 Link Types
• SPARQL Wrapper for Python available in Debian GNU/LiNUX
• My (Continued) SPARQL Debacle
• Google App Engine – “enables developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power our own applications”
• Google App Engine for developers, Sharecropper Alert, Google App Engine: Free and still barely worth it, Google App Engine: Its the Architecture Stupid!, Google AppEngine – A Second Look, Google App Engine and the Joy of WebArch
• Google AppEngine for Personal Web Presence?
• Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2
• Scaling Out MySQL
• Yahoo Pitches the Lazy Developer
• Where to Find Open Data on the Web
• Powerset: Don’t call us a search engine
• Mail2.0: POP3 verses atom
• Web dev frameworks vs RIA
• Metadata about RDF triples: reification and Linked Data – see also : named graphs, n-ary relations, 5th Normal Form, Reifying RDF (properly), and N3, Rules and Formulae
• Google – Crawling through HTML forms, Another Deep Web Barrier Fall
• eRDF as Query and Report language
• Wish List: Contact Priorities
• Staying in Sync
• Virgin Media CEO attacks net neutrality (“bollocks”), see also : Tim Berners-Lee on net neutrality (“This is serious”)

Software News

• OwlSight .50 – ontology browser
• Adding WordPress Blogs into the Linked Data Web using Virtuoso
• Two more ARQ extensions – assignment and subqueries
• D2R server working on top of Musicbrainz db
• enterprisesocialgraph - “simple community Google App Engine project to allow enterprise users
  to maintain one single social graph”
• OpenID for Google Accounts – Google App Engine project
• RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws, Erlang, Yaws, and ETag
• baetle – bug tracking ontology
• Sharedance – “a daemon to centralize keys and associated data”
• Ringside Identity Mapping
• Paths to the New Reality

Events etc.

• Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge
• Interesting Free Web Seminar on RDF Triples April 11th
• 2nd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), May 6, Innsbruck, Austria
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• Scoble 3.0
• List of HTTP Status Codes, Comma-separated
• World Music Ontologies – expressed as “Knowledge Webs”
• IST researchers classify Web searches – 80% informational, 10% navigational, 10%
  commercial/transactional
• RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers
• Flirting with MIME Types : a browser’s perspective [pdf]
• Book reviews: Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. We-Think, by Charles Leadbeater
• A Brief History of Cutting Code in a Universe Three Doors Down
• Disney shutting down its Virtual Magic Kingdom MMO
• An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Quote of the Week

Have fun with the Semantic Web…it’s about connecting things together, about getting the jobs done.

- Dave Beckett

~

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