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This Week’s Semantic Web

21st April 2008, 04:29 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web 0

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.

How the Web Works

- 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…

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

~

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 meor use the mail meor use the del.icio.us tag “twsw” - thanks!

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This Week’s Semantic Web

14th April 2008, 06:20 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web 2

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

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

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 mail meor use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” -thanks!

This Week’s Semantic Web

7th April 2008, 07:56 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web 1

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-04-07, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Semantic Web Exit

Lots more around social networks and DataPortability this week, with a handy post from Bob DuCharme on what RDF has to offer beyond what’s provided by XML formats.

The pieces might be falling into place for Paul Ford’s predictions in his 2002 classic August 2009:
How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web. Google recently went public with their RDF-aware Social Graph API, and this week eBay describe how they’re using RDF internally (primarily system documention). While Amazon themselves have yet to reveal anything that’s unquestionably Semantic Web, they’re clearly working in a nearby space with their commodification of online storage and processing (which can be used to develop Semantic Web-oriented systems). But right now, of the big public-facing players, Yahoo! are probably ahead of the field with their deployments, though even Microsoft have investment in Semantic Web technologies.

Whatever, the future is already here: the first of the month saw the release of a Universal RDF Encoder.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

Forget Markup Barbie… I want Unicode Barbie. When you pull her string, she says “text is hard.”

-Aristotle Pagaltzis

~

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 meor use the mail meor use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” - thanks!

This Week’s Semantic Web

31st March 2008, 09:07 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web 0

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-03-31, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

DataPortability features highly this week - though intended more as a principle, and an umbrella for all kinds of technologies, the significant overlap with the Semantic Web vision hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Microsoft have been experimenting with a triplestore/rdb hybrid - “…they are coming around, albeit gradually :-)” says Kingsley.

There seems to be a lot happening around the various mailing lists at the moment. Despite the growth of other communication channels, this still seems to be a big one - it certainly remains the best option for permathreads and bickering. For comparison: Wiki collaboration leads to happiness (hmm, Word & Outlook are somewhat wild variables in that diagram).

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Most Productive SemWeb Coder of the Week

[a trial/one-off category, as suggested - feel free to make nominations for next week]

Events etc.

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

This is the year we finish the job, I reckon…

-danbri, via email

~

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 mail me or use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” - thanks!

This Week’s Semantic Web

24th March 2008, 06:40 pm by Danny Ayers In: This Week's Semantic Web 0

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-01-07, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

No obvious themes this week, but still lots of activity in diverse areas. So instead of introductory blurb, here’s a seasonal picture:

Duck-Rabbit_illusion_smaller.jpg

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck” - but what if it also hops like a bunny?

(source - public domain)

In the Media