triple|scape

Happy SundaySaturday, kids. Here’s the first installment of The Week In Linked Data. Not a ton of stuff, but it’s a start as I begin to ferret out the best news sources for this stuff, beyond the obvious. If you’ve got a good source or have something you’d like me to post or link to, email me (brian.manley at gmail) or hit me on twitter or identi.ca (bmanley).

Miscellaneous

• Brooke Aker (CEO, Expert System), Scott Brinker (ion interactive) and David Provost are the latest folks to talk with Paul Miller over at Talis. I always enjoy these talks, though I sometimes get sleepy listening to them. It’s something about the intro music and Paul’s calm, hypnotist-like voice.
• Swirrl looks to be an interesting wiki technology with RDF under the skirt. Text, data sets and tags among the support data items. Free for up to
  100 pages, 5 “data sets” and 500 “data set cells”. I interpret that to mean you can have up to five classes, with up to 500 triples. $14 will get you 10k triples. Seems a bit steep. “It’s like a wiki, but better”. Uh. Sure.
• LODr was just released. “LODr is a RDF-based (re-)tagging service, that allows people to weave their Web 2.0 tagged data into the Linked Data Web and provides a dedicated browsing interface”. Apparently you need to have a local LAMP stack installed, along with ARC. I’m up to my ass in alligators already, so I don’t have time to install and try it. Any chance this will be a hosted service?
• Microsoft’s Famulus research-output repository thingy looks to get more Fabulous with the inclusion of support for RDF/RDFS. No idea how this thing works, and I’m not about to install SQL Server and a bunch of .NET stuff to
  find out, but if you’re a Microsoft user you might want to check it out.
• No Virginia, the Semantic Web is not ‘On the Cusp‘. Maybe. Seth Grimes asserts that the existence of 17 semantic web companies does not an industry make. I kind of find the whole thing amusing. What the hell is a semantic web industry anyway? “Hello, Mrs. Johnston? Can I interest you in some semantic web today?”
• I think Kingsley Idehen secretly wants to be a graphic artist. He’s produced a nice graphic of his company’s RDF-izer collection, and a fun animation of swiss cheese turning documents into RDF. Who knew cheese was so useful?
• Benjamin Nowack is at it again. This time it’s Paggr. I’m not sure what I’d call it…semantic home page builder? Whatever it is, it’s sick and I want one. Check the video here. How is this guy so productive? It seems like we see something cool from him every few weeks. Bastard.
• Bob DuCharme is learning SPARQL. As a by-product, he’ll soon be an authority on all but the most arcane details of The Simpsons!
• Search Engine Land reports that Google will “soon” be offering RSS feeds of your searches as an extension go Google Alerts. RWW also reporting
  on this. Yea! Even More RSS to wallow through.

Specifications

• SPARQL Update has been published as a W3C Member Submission. Wishing there was some commentary on how they suggest updating SPARQL Protocol results tho. Anywho, congrats to all the authors and let’s hope it gets standardized sooner rather than later.
• For you GRDDL-ers, Dan Connolly reports that the XHTML namespace document has been updated with a namespaceTransformation pointer to an RDFa to RDF/XML translation. So if you GRDDL, you might want to fetch http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml once in awhile. But not every time! Keep a local cache do you don’t bork the origin servers. Thanks. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/issues#issue-html-nsdoc
  for more info and background. By the way, do you pronounce GRDDL as “griddle” or “girdle”? I like “girdle” myself.
• Ivan Herman reports that the W3C OWL Working Group has just published (zomg!) SEVEN drafts
  for OWL 2. This includes the structural specification, direct and RDF based semantics, RDF/XML serialization (yuk), Profiles, conformance and test cases. If these don’t fix danja’s insomnia, nothing will. Pointers to the docs are here.

Conferences

• ISWC ‘08 is just around the corner. I’m not going, and it’s killing me a little each day.
• Creative Commons second technology summit Call For Papers will end October 24. They’re looking for projects on and around CC licnenses and technology. For example, RDFa deployments and consumption, building on ccREL, digital copyright and provenance. Full details can be found
  here.
• 3rd International Conference on Adapative Business Information Systems, CFP. Topics include Enterprise Information Management, Business Collaboration, Supply Chains and Logistics, E-Business, Business Intelligence, On-Demand Business, Information Infrastructures. Businessy Stuff. More info here.
• The Second International Conference on the Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies (say that three times fast) is being held August 4-6 in London. Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Computing, Networking, Web Content Mining, Health Informatics, Bioinformatics and IT Applications across disciplines. Might be interesting. More info at http://www.dirf.org/diwt2009/.