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14 April 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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 del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

7 April 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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.

semweb-exit.jpg

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 del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 07:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

31 March 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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 meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 09:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 March 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

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!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

17 March 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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

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

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 del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 07:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

10 March 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

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 meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 09:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

3 March 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

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

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

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 meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

25 February 2008

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-02-25, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Happy 9th Birthday, RDF...Happy 100th Birthday Axiomatic Set Theory

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

It is of course required by law that the very last thing in every presentation be a URL

-Bryan Alexander, via David Weinberger

~

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