Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-05-12, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Another burst of activity this week around the general area of DataPortability, with announcements from MySpace, Facebook and Google regarding the opening up of social network data. While it isn’t yet clear how much better these systems will at meshing with the Giant Global Graph, it certainly seems a step in the right direction.

In the Media

• Video: Semantic Technology in Enterprise Computing
• Video: Where does the time come from? (transcript)
• Podcast: Library 2.0 Gang 05/08: ILS API
• Podcast: Peter Mika talks about SearchMonkey and the Semantic Technology Conference
• Podcast: DataPortability: In-Motion
• Slides: Golem and CrystalEye - mashing up science data
• Slides: With or Without UIDs

Docs

• Proposed Activity for Video on the Web
• Should every web page be semantic-backed?
• Peter Mika offers bananas at Yahoo! Research
• SPARQL Update to Complete RESTful SOA Scenario
• Open Notebook Science–sensemaking
• Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary 0.1, discussion
• Describing Copyright in RDF, The Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo) - also with spec in RDFa
• The Role of UMBEL: Stuck in the Middle with You . . .
• The Open Data licensing issue
• Explaining Web 1.0, Web 2.0 & Web 3.0
• XTech report
• Thoughts on DataPortability, The care and feeding of online relationships, DataPortability, SPARQL and the “Connect!” button
• MySpace joins the ’semantic’ web, Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web (Press Release), Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’

Software News

• Powerset Wikipedia/Freebase search, (review at TechCrunch)
• Prototype for distributed / decentralised microblogging using semantics
• Owlgres 0.1 - OWL reasoner using Postgres
• Server-side storage of OWL syntax
• Introducing StraightWalker - WordPress theme with semweb hooks
• baby steps at linking library data
• Dbpedia Benchmark Revisited
• processing.js, the hidden value of processing.js
• webthumb - REST API for generating thumbnails from Mozilla
• Twitter Jabber PubSub

Events etc.

• Semantic Web Meeting, Austin, 13th May
• Evening beers with Music Ontology, MusicBrainz folks, London, May 14
• SearchMonkey launch party, Yahoo!, Bay Area, May 15
• Data Sharing Workshop/Summit, Mountain View, CA, May 15
• Semantic Web Challenge - “The data set for the Billion Triples Challenge has been posted”
• 1st NEPOMUK - Social Semantic Desktop - Summer School
• 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008)
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• semantic-web@w3.org

Miscellany

• Teaching Kids Computer Skills and Programming
• SciSpace - social networking site for scientists
• Announcing xrdstype.net - service type registry
• The hard stuff - VRM Use Cases

Quote of the Week

the semantic web is already here if you know where to look

- Julian Higman

~

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!

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I just had the pleasure of being a guest on DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast - Episode 7. Trent has show notes over there. It’s got quite a bit of discussion about the role of Semantic Web technologies in DataPortability, some argument about the role of microformats (a transitional technology, or an end in themselves?), some stuff on business aspects of the Web (not exactly my forte) a little handwaving about Talis (should have been better prepared for that - but I often forget we’re a commercial entity

Notable quote (not from me, more’s the pity):

Doesn’t matter how big you are, the Web is always bigger

The interview part is preceded by a segment on some legal aspects to DP, along with the news of MySpace and others announcing they are further opening up their systems. The news came after the interview was recorded, in case it seems strange it wasn’t mentioned.

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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!

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