Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-05-06, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

A little later and shorter than usual this week due to public holiday and rsi…normal service will be resumed next week.

In the Media

• Podcast: Christine Connors talks about semantic technologies at Dow Jones
• Podcast: Semantic Gang on Wikipedia for Data
• Podcast: Talking about WWW2008 on the BBC
• Podcast: 15th anniversary of CERN releasing the World Wide Web code for free
• Video: Chris Messina talks about his project DiSo
• Maling list: public-rdf-ruby@w3.org
• Class: Semantic Web 2.0 and Semantic HTML

Docs

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 – Candidate Recommendation
• A Survey of Current Approaches for Mapping of Relational Databases to RDF
• Opening and closing like flowers (social platform roundupathon)
• Walled gardens: mapping the parties
• In Perpetual Pursuit of Context
• Perspective Applications
• Digg makes official its adoption of a ‘semantic Web’ standard
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee addresses WWW2008 in Beijing
• Microformats test-suite concept
• London Gazette to use RDFa
• On Sem Web Search
• Linked Data enters state of Evoluation
• Linked Data Trip Report – Part 1, WWW 2008, Linked Data and Information Architecture, SPARQL at WWW 2008, WWW 2008 reports on Twitter
• XTech Talks covering Linked Data
• Semantic Web talks in Innsbruck
• Understanding Model-View-Controller

Software News

• SPARQLBot – “Your Semantic Web Command Line”
• SPARQLScript
• Building a Web 3.0 Address Book, The So(m)mer Address Book (aka Beatnik) – now available via Java WebStart, and showing at JavaOne
• Piglet – “a small RDF triple store written in C++”
• RDFohloh – RDF wrapper of Ohloh, open source directory, details
• Sonivis – social network/wiki analysis tool
• Distributed Twitter Client in 20 lines of code [it's a Ruby Jabber client]
• XBRL Ontology group, first cut XBRL to RDF
• Ad hoc plumbing
• VRM with FOAF + OpenID
• DOLCE-UltraLite – upper ontology, OWL DL
• GraphPath – “a little-language for analysing graph-structured data, especially RDF”

Events etc.

• Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF at XTech 2008
• Support for US students attending ISWC 2008
• 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008)
• Semantic Web Interest Group f2f meeting proposal (in France, during week of Oct 20-24 2008)
• CFP Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• freeourdata.org.uk
• Rapping About Proper HTML
• Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats
• Web Inspired Terrestrial Radio
• Please yo-yo the rrm
• Restarter martyr: sounds of Firefox 3b5

~

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 del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-04-28, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

This week was dominated by WWW2008 in Beijing, an interesting location as the WWW2008 photos on Flickr attest. There are tons of resources available via the WWW2008 site, and individual workshops like Linked Data on the Web and the W3C Open Your Data! session. Not surprisingly the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad was rather busy – only a tiny selection of the material from these sources linked below.

One interesting aspect, to quote Ivan Herman: “Huajun Chen gave an overview [pdf] on what is happening in the Semantic Web area in China. In two words: a lot.”

I don’t think it’ll be very long before I can retire these manually-compileded posts, in favour of something more comprehensive and better faceted. An indicator is Twine, despite still being in (genuine) beta has rapidly become a key source for info on Semantic Web developments, either in the anglo Web 3.0 – Semantic Web or if vous preferons, un twine Web sémantique. (I have a few Twine invitations, mail me if you’re interested).

In the Media

• Wiki: semanticweb.org
• Blog: n²
• Podcast: A conversation with Deepak Singh about science in the web 2.0 era
• Podcasts: The
  Library 2.0 Gang
• Slides: SIOC tutorial at WWW2008
• Slides: UMBEL Web Services
• Video: Nova Spivack at DigitalNow
• Video: Linking to DBpedia with TopBraid
• Videos: SemanticCamp Paris 1
• Jobs: Want to Work at Talis?
• Science 2.0 — Is Open Access Science the Future?

Docs

• Linked Data on the Web, WWW2008, Update from WWW2008, Attending WWW2008, Semantic Web W3C Track at WWW2008, A Semantic Multimedia Web – Create, Annotate, Present and Share your Media, Nadeem’s reports
• For review: HCLS Knowledgebase – “a biomedical knowledge base that integrates 15 distinct data sources”, Experiences with the conversion of SenseLab databases to RDF/OWL
• Understanding SPARQL – “create journaling micro-blogs with the semantic Web” (IBM developerWorks)
• The economic case for Open Science
• Tying FOAF identity with the identity semantics of OpenID
• LForum – Linked Discussion Forums on the Web of Data
• Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)
• Semantic Web in the Startup School
• Web 3.0 just around the corner?
• MIME types and library metadata
• The original FOAF images
• FOAF & SSL: creating a global decentralised authentication protocol
• Authoring RDFa from within a Wiki
• Setting up an RDFa file with Apache (second)
• APML-RDF
• openData Definition, ???
• Linked Data are the roots for the Future Web
• The Freebase Blog
• Nouns and Resources
• Hubjects on Twine
• XForms, Dyslexia and the Right Brain
• Owlgres, DL-Lite and Selectivity Optimizations
• Important New Jersey Supreme Court decision in Internet privacy
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
• It’s a big planet…, +1

Software News

• dbpedia mobile, Social, mobile, semantic
• Sesame 2.1
• QuASAR SW services validator
• Open Anzo – Semantic Application Middleware
• Cyparkler 1.0 – “implements a query factory for SPARQL and SeRQL”
• SPARQLScript
• SemWebParlParse – “takes XML data about the UK Parliament and re-publishes it in
  semantic web format”
• Online Semantic Community Framework
• Optimus: Microformats data transformer
• Fenfire Linked Data browser
• Cadbury World – “is an adventure into the world of chocolate” (Talis Engage demo)
• Friends In Feed – “is an experiment in secure distributed social networking”
• RDFa-”enhacked” validator add-on for Firefox
• So(m)mer Address Book home page
• linqtordf – LINQ Query Provider for Semantic Web Applications

Events etc.

• Upcoming deadlines
• Support for US students attending ISWC 2008
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Subtle Promo

Miscellany

• debategraph
• ProofWiki
• Collective Intelligence Book
• BBC joining OpenID Foundation
• New
  business models for life science content
• Interview
  with Donald Knuth
• Cloud Security
• Another
  week (or two) in CouchDB
• Top
  10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype
• Happy
  spamiversary! Spam reaches 30
• IdeaScale
  – Crowdsourcing R&D
• Wii remote
  projects

Quote of the Week

Linked Data is the Semantic Web done as it should be. It is the Web done as it should be.

- Tim Berners-Lee
(via Paul)

~

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 tag “TWSW” – thanks!

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…

In the Media

• Print: Nodalities Magazine of the Semantic Web (pdf or printed, free)
• FT: World-wise web?
• Slides: UMBEL Semantic Web Services
• Diagram: How it works: The Web (see above)
• Howstuffworks: How Semantic Web Works, see also – Teaching a Six Year Old About Triples
• On the road to the Semantic Web

Docs

• RIF WG Publishes long awaited working drafts
• Delivery Context Ontology – from W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications WG
• Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web – W3C XG Report
• Proposed W3C Activity for Video on the Web
• Towards RDFS 3.0 (or OWL 2 R Full)
• Open Science Directory
• The Semantic Web – none of Public Relations’ business?
• Creating a HTML “friends” page from a Google Reader subscription list, GRDDLing DeWitt’s Friends
• Simple “Semantification” of WordPress
• Identifying Spatial and Temporal Media Fragments on the Web (pdf)
• The RDF Virtual Machine
• Resource Description Framework on Citizendium Wiki
• General Formal Ontology, Wikipedia entry
• The OpenId Sequence Diagram
• The Difference Between OpenID and OAuth
• FOAF & SSL: creating a global decentralised authentication system
• A complete beginner’s guide to starting a Jena project in Eclipse
• Understanding the power of communities – even when you do not have a critical mass of users…
• Dreaming away about a user centric web
• semantic camp paris – short report
• Namespacing & Context – ramifications for the semantic web – semweb without URIs?

Software News

• Exploding the Domain: UMBEL Web Services by Zitgist
• Yago resources now retrievable on the Web
• Really cool SIOC widget from Sindice
• KiWi: Knowledge in a Wiki
• Eculture project demo
• Talis Platform client (RubyForge)
• Fuzzbot support RDFa (Firefox plugin)
• OwlSight Update: v.51 – bugfixes
• pydataportability 0.1
• cells: triple-cells/read-me.lisp
• PubMed search URL
• Another Do-It-Yourself Framework (Python)

Events etc.

• LOD Triplification Challenge
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• Web Architecture: Extensible Languages
• Morph Application Platform
• Ready for Live Mesh?
• Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers – “half pregnant”
• Twubble – Twitter friend-of-friend finder
• How Hypertable works
• It’s Just Gone – with no Internet, South Park cannot learn what happened to the Internet
• China vaults past USA in Internet users
• ISPs’ Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web
• Elements or attributes?
• Jevons paradox
• Why My Blog Is Dangerous
• TitanURL.com – “making URLs unusable!”
• New pet

~

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 del.icio.us tag “twsw” – thanks!

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!

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.

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

• Logos: (as above) from SemanticWebCompany
• Video: Learning from the Future with Chris Saad
• Format change: Semantic Report, feed
• Slide remix: Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked DataWeb
• Lesson: Teaching a Six Year Old About Triples
• The Semantic Web in Action Article From Scientific American Online and Free

Docs

• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
• Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7
• eBay Looks to the Semantic Web
• Digg starts using RDFa
• Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
• Ofcom report on Social Networking
• Introducing SPO(G)
• Nash Equilibria in Non-Cooperative Data Modeling
• SPARQL FAQ
• “OWL 2″ is the Next Version of the Web Ontology Language
• RDFS 3.0
• RDB2RDF XG mailing lists
• IRC RDF logs and foaf:chatEvent
• Mockup sketching how we might visualise RDF vocab distribution
• RDF and social networks
• Teach students GIS using Geonames
• LinkedIn’s Semantic Technology Initiatives
• What is Data Portability?
• Dublin Core Education Community Wiki
• RDFa Wiki
• Visualizing the Emergence of a Strategic Knowledge Cluster
• functional (web) resources
• Basing UMBEL’s Backbone on OpenCyc
• Semantic Weblogs
• Closing of the SWEO Interest Group – “our work here is done…”

Software News

• 13.1 billion [music-related] triples
• MusicBrainz SQL-to-RDF D2RQ mapping
• Raptor Web Library 1.4.17 – “there’s more to see than just triples”
• Semantic Email
• NaturalOWL – “generating texts from ontologies”
• FOAF pathfinder – “cargo cult edition” [Ruby], see also: 2002 FOAF Co-depiction path finder
• Freebase Data Dumps, Open CellID databases, Some Datasets Available on the Web
• Neo4J – “is a netbase – a network-oriented database… optional layers to expose Neo as an RDF store”
• single sign on with no password, using SSL + foaf
• When your OpenID provider goes offline…
• The geographic spread of crystallography
• New Globus release

Events etc.

• Open Knowledge London Group – meeting “later this month”
• Microformats vEvent, London, 27th May – One Big Happy Family (FOAF/RDF and Microformats)
• Linked Data Planet program in place
• Essay Contest: What’s Web 3.0 / the Semantic Web / the Giant Global Graph and Why It All Matters?
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org
  archives

Miscellany

• (Back to) The Future of Interactive Media
• What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important?
• Cancer research Web exploits human Genome map
• What a DVCS gets you (maybe)
• Feds lie about link between software piracy and terrorism
• Web 3.0 isn’t the Semantic Web, it’s Hailstorm 2.0. Why it Matters & How Microsoft-Yahoo can beat Google., Web 3.0 belongs to those who control personal profile infrastructure
• USB and Atom
• Google Inc.’s Statement about IPR related to RFC 5023 and RFC 4287
• HTML5: the foreign lands (mathematics and graphics)
• On Twitter
• Tweet!
• Mark V Shaney
• Your Facebook Profile Isn’t Really “You”
• Critical Metrics - “is a bibliographic database of highly recommended songs”
• “Hidden Costs” Of Watching TV Online?
• 10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die
• Card Sorting
• Textism

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 del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

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

• Semantic Web in the news
• Scientific American: “The Semantic Web in Action” – now online
• “The semantic web enables us to use portals in a more intelligent fashion, so we can do business more efficiently”
• Podcast: Introducing the Semantic Web Gang
• Slides: DataPortability and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web
• Graphic: Social Network Stack
• Mailing list: Linking Open Data‘s list has moved
• Mailing list: new Social XMPPlist
• Video: Les Horribles Cernettes – Collider
• Video: DataPortability and Me (Get Your Data Out!)

Docs

• In Defense of Ambiguity
• New RDFa Primer
• SocialWebXGCharter, relationship to DataPortability.org
• Trip planning via the Semantic Web
• (De-)centralised me
• Thoughts on the Billion Triple Challenge
• Fingerprinting and Metadata Progress Report (on last.fm)
• DataPortability, Microsoft’s Contacts API and OpenSocial.org
• Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories, Relationships can have properties as well – MS do “semantic web lite”
• Delivering Data Portability (Part 2) – “Sharing Contacts Between Social Networks”
• The Cost of doing the Right Thing
• A Re-Introduction to UMBEL, The emergence of UMBEL and Linked Data
• Putting XRDS-Simple in Context
• A Journey of a Thousand Steps, We don’t need DataPortability
• Query: Semantic Web Alignment with the Underlying Security Infrastructure
• Getting Freebase onto the Semantic Web
• DevX.com Semantic Web Zone
• semantic technology in AAAI Spring Sympothia 2008
• RDFAuth: sketch of a buzzword compliant authentication protocol, RDFAuth, with less Story-telling
• literals and resources
• Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies, Nitpicking Alex’s Semantic Web Patterns, Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies (Update 1), Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies (Update 2)
• RDF and MOO notes

Software News

• Linking Open Data cloud updated
• OwlSight version 0.36
• knowee – “is a semantic web address book and contact data manager”
• Social Graph API parser test API – “to run any document against the Social Graph API’s internal parser to see what it would’ve parsed, had Googlebot actually crawled it” see also: Google sgapi example
• Virtuoso, Open-Source Edition version 5.0.6, Virtuoso 5.0.6 Updates
• Raptor RDF Parser Library version 1.4.17
• New ARC2 plugins
• Two more ARQ extensions
• SKUA project – distributed network of semantically aware shared annotated services prototype for astronomy
• SPARQL Browser (using Flex) – see also netthreads
• triplr “Stuff in, triples out” – JSON serializers callback parameter restored – happy 1st birthday!
• Animal Diversity Web – has OWL
• Creating a HTML “friends” page from a Google Reader subscription list
• Windows Live Contacts API
• Integrating Triplify with Joomla! – Google Summer of Code proposal
• FOAF whitelisting for mailman?
• Sindice in use
• Mapping photographs – “an AJAX/Google Maps hack”
• RESTlet – “lightweight REST framework for Java”

Most Productive SemWeb Coder of the Week

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

• Keith Alexander, who’s produced three new ARC2 plugins :
• • An RDFa Serializer
  • Utilities for working with ARC structures (e.g. filter, merge, or diff)
  • A SPARQL (Re-)Serializer (very handy for checking/adjusting SPARQL queries before they are passed to the store)
  • - plus a SPARQL+wrapper for Talis Platform stores.

Events etc.

• Over The Air, 4th-5th April, London
• Portable London 0.96b – DataPortability Lunch Meet-up, Sunday April 6, London
• SemanticCampParis 2 – 4 avril
• Internship – interesting semweb stuff in Cambridge, Mass.
• Call for Chapter Proposals: Event-based Systems, Publish/Subscribe and Message Filtering
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org archives

Miscellany

• State of SVG, State of the Bird, WordPress 2.5 releases
• RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws
• Customizing nxml to find your schemas automatically
• “Full Text of Google’s General Guidelines for Remote Quality Raters from April 2007“
• On meetings
• Diana Ross’ unexpected career move

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 del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

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:

“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

• Podcast: Jim Hendler talks about the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence
• Diagram: Features in N3, SPARQL where clauses, Turtle and NTriples
• Economist: online social networks – Everywhere and nowhere
• Book: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist

Docs

• OpenOffice RDF API draft
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web – last call draft
• Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Description Resources – updated draft
• RDFa Primer 1.0 – updated draft
• Making Links at the BBC
• How to make OpenID really rock
• how binary relations beat tuples
• Why Flickr Doesn’t Do FOAF – [timbl: So do you think Flickr could be persuaded to source FOAF? dajobe: maybe ]
• A typical day working with RDF and FOAF
• Interoperability by Friction
• IR and SW communities
• Gathering SPARQL Extensions
• On software architecture, Connecting, REST, Hypermedia, and JSON
• Addressing Doubts about REST
• Linked Data is vital to Enterprise Integration driven Agility
• Use Oracle technology for spatial RDF graph query
• GeoNames Ontology
• WHOIS Ontology, Who’s who description vocabulary, BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information
• More Talis Bloggers
• Zitgist Got its Orchestrator
• Installing Virtuoso Open Source Edition on Windows
• Semantic Web Advocate of Tribe Linked Data!

Software News

• Triplify – “a small plugin for database driven Web applications which exposes RDF, Linked Data and JSON” from Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW)
• Semantify – Automate Your Semantic Web SEO in Five Minutes – not altogether well-received
• Owlgres – “a scalable OWL database”
• RDF::Query 2.000
• SPARQL Wrapper for Python 1.1.0
• Curies: A Ruby library for parsing and creating CURIEs
• Cypher Natural Language to RDF/SPARQL transcoder
• i r s – “a generic linked data editor with RDFa export”
• schemacache
• VocabularyMarket, Semantic Web Search Engines
• Falcons statistics of indexed entities (classes, properties, objects or
  individuals)
• Semantic Web Formats Converter, triplr – “stuff in, triples out”
• Perl code that archives your Flickr
• XSB – “is a Logic Programming and Deductive Database system for Unix and Windows”
• Prolog-2-RDF, km-rdf
• RSpec is Fun
• Prism for Firefox
• First Week of Twine Beta Phase II Report
• tabulator and google reader notifier oddness

Events etc.

• XTech registration open, schedule published
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org archives

Miscellany

• VC confab: Please, no more social networks
• Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?
• C2: Microsoft’s take on FriendFeed?
• “Disks have become tapes”
• Google’s own robots.txt
• Awards for orgs which contributed to open source
• Web creator rejects net tracking
• Mark Mail allows search of W3C lists: 400,000 emails
• Now Companies too have profiles on LinkedIn!
• Pirates
• I Haven’t Got a Myspace Because…

Quote of the Week

Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, “Standards are tough! Let’s go shopping!”

-Mark
Pilgrim translates Joel Spolsky

~

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 del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-03-17, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Big news this week regarding Yahoo! and the Semantic Web – an update about the Yahoo! Search open platform describes their adoption of significant support for Semantic Web technologies : RDF (with several key vocabularies), microformats, RDFa and eRDF. While it’s been no secret that Yahoo! has been quietly developing with RDF for a while, the surprise here is the level of integration with their most visible application, search.

Speaking of RDFa, “microformats all grown up“, its momentum continues to grow, and the announcements of a new RDFa Wiki and mailing list for developers and publishers are well timed to catch this wave.

While there’s no major announcement right now from the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) W3C WG, they deserve a special mention due to their maintenance of a regularly-updated blog of meetings, issues and decisions that appear – openness beyond the call of duty!

btw, I got a Twine beta invite this week, and several of the links below came from there – thanks Nova!

In the Media

• Podcast: Barak Pridor Talks about ClearForest, Calais, Reuters and the Semantic Web
• Podcast: A Chat with Richard Cyganiak
• Podcast: Norman Gray Talks with Talis about Astronomy and the Semantic Web
• Podcast: Eric Miller talks about Zepheira and semantically enabling systems for the Semantic Technology conference
• Diagram: HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST)

For more semweb-related podcasts see talk.talis.com.

Docs

• Web creator rejects net tracking
• Google could be superseded, says web inventor, see also Telephone Game about the Semantic Web
• Hung Up On the Semantic (Web)
• Semantic thoughts
• The Shaky Semantics of the Semantic Web
• RDFa Wiki, public-rdfamailing list
• People as Data Connectors
• RDF Primer — Turtle version
• Get Started with the Semantic Web
• The media and the Semantic Web (short post)
• Set Algebra For Updating a Triple Store
• W3C XG on Uncertainty Reasoning
• RESTful message queues
• Networks are everywhere
• Portable Social Networks session at sxsw
• Portable contact lists and the case against XFN
• Dynamic Foaf – Issues with XFN
• Twine’s dual personality
• beer causes karaoke

Software News

• The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem,Yahoo! Search reading the semantic web, Semantic Web Search Engine Roundup, Looking for a dominant Semantic Web search engine, Semantic Web Rising, The (lowercase) semantic web goes mainstream, And Nerds Became Queens: Yahoo and Smart Searches
• Triplify – “expose semantics!” – lightweight PHP RDB2RDF tool
• i r s – “eats all kinda stuff, such as RDFa, RDF/XML, etc.”
• MySpace RDF service
• FOAF/Music Ontology exporter for last.fm (interlinked with Musicbrainz) on build.last.fm
• Application Idea : Music/Audio Equipment Lists
• Why RDFa is the only Web scaleable metadata format for next-generation search engines
• RDFa In Wiki Interface (RiWi)
• RDFa Support coming in ODF 1.2
• ARC2 Extractors, including RDFa
• RDFa Test Harness
• twinkle-sparql-tools
• Tabulator does N3
• Drupal calling Semantic Web..!
• Linked Open Data projects, (partial) machine-readable list
• Bio2RDF – Semantic Web atlas of postgenomic knowledge about human and mouse
• phennowl is an RDF enabled IRC bot running on #swig
• open-nars – “an intelligent reasoning system”
• ConceptNet “is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and
  natural-language-processing toolkit”
• Transforming XML in Ajax with XSLT
• Semantic Web Tomorrow, Semantic Marketing TODAY!

Events etc.

• Commercial uses of the Semantic Web at WWW2008?
• Linked Data at Google Summer of Code?
• Over the Air, London, 4th and 5th April
• Semantic Technology Conference, May 18-22, San Jose
• XTech 2008, 6-9 May 2008, Dublin, Ireland
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org archives

Miscellany

• Spaghetti-Western Coding
• The Adoption-Led Market
• Ozzie signals Microsoft’s surrender to the cloud
• Why
  We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data
• GovTrack.us: a weak link?
• Six degrees of separation proves no separation
• Child-like intelligence created in Second Life

~

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 del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-03-10, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Big news this week was Drupal and the opportunity of RDF – the popular content management system looking seriously toward the Semantic Web.

PR-watchers might note the announcement of the Google Contact Data API arrived in the same few days as Why data matters and How Google keeps your information secure.

[Running late - only minimal notes for now]

In the Media

• Video: DrupalCon “video from the future”, see also: The Best is Yet to Come
• Lecture: From Representing Knowledge to Deploying Metadata in the Multimedia Domain
• Slides: Twinkle & SPARQL Query Forms
• Podcast: A Chat with Tom Morris
• Newsletter: Semantic Web Company, March 2008
• Slides: The Social Web, Data Portability, and the W3C

Docs

• W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group
• DataPortability Wiki
• Web 3G:The Third Generation of the Web
• Semantic Web Aliases
• Driving Lanes on the Web based Information Super Highway
• Complete beginner’s guide to starting a Jena project in Eclipse
• Modeling Statistics in RDF – A Survey and Discussion, Modelling Statistical Publications: Some Notes
• Documents Types in RDF
• POPS
  is new W3C SWEO Use Case
• Talk on XMPP at SNP WebCamp
• Language Expertise in FOAF: Speaks, Reads, Writes revisited
• Templating Language for Authoring Tools
• Accessibility problems with microformats, Accessibility, Microformats, and Rule by Mob
• Yahoo Microsearch supports RDFa
• Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) Resource Page
• Design By Attrition [HTML5]
• REST vs. Erlang vs. XMPP
• It’s an Atompub World
• RELAX NG for matching
• Ditching the Semantic Web?
• The Semantic Web takes shape, with Twine
• G’day Nova
• Open Handle – identification and resolution services on the Internet (fixed links)
• “Blacklight is intended as a general faceted browser with keyword inclusion for use by libraries and digital collections”
• Trusting people on the Web
• Save Ontologies from the Ontologists
• Amit Sheth’s blog
• Aman’s Blog

Software News

• Seek: stop searching, start finding (your email) [dhuynh++]
• StYLiD – Structure Your own Linked Data
• sidekick calendar subscription for SXSW
• Drupalcon Boston 2008 – RDF-based schedule
• Discover Nepomuk As a User
• SPARQL Endpoint interface to Python
• SparqPlug – RDFizing service
• RDF::Query 2.0 beta
• Implementing FOAF in Rails
• Opening Sesame with Networked Graphs
• implementing a moat server
• Semantics in the wild: new jOWL wine Demo
• hAudio for microformats mixtapes, in progress
• Python Microformats Parser
• Contexts in rdflib
• R2D2 – RDF to Database too
• Yahoo! Fire Eagle – location-oriented API
• Yahoo! Media Player, see also: Checking in
• Google Contacts Data API, see also: Network Address Book, Beatnik
• Flex: Social Graph Browser
• graphpipes – “is a visual tool for the web to create complex SPARQL-queries and reuse them later in Networked Graphs”
• TreeTriples – yet another RDF syntax
• jQuery.Talis – “is a plugin for the popular javascript library jQuery. It acts as a wrapper around the talis convert service, for retrieving json, through jsonp, from the Platform”
• ARC2_IndexUtils plugin – for processing rdf/json-shaped data
• WebDAV AJAX Library
• Different ways of inserting RDF into Virtuoso
• Noodling with Atom/RDF
• rdfbus - “middleware for enabling RDF publish/subscribe payloads over XMPP and Stomp, based on the RDF.rb library”
• Tamarind – “…Semantic Web…targets developers using Ruby frameworks and ORMs”
• open-nars – “an intelligent reasoning system”
• topicle – “search engine community”

Events etc.

• HTMLTestJam – Austin and/or #html-wg IRC, 10-11 March
• Dataportability Meetup, SF CA, March 20, 2008
• Open Coffee Galway
• See also : Semantic Web Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• CfPs – see recent semantic-web@w3.org archives

Miscellany

• Who Killed Gopher?
• Philosophy of information blog
• Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki
• generatedata.com
• Choose Your Own Adventure book as directed graph
• RIP Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D
• Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio
• A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears
• Awesomeness

Quote of the Week

For the record, my site is valid HTML 5, except the parts that aren’t. My therapist says I shouldn’t rely so much on external validation.

-Mark Pilgrim

~

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!

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!