Meh.
Howdy-do folks. Time for The Week in Linked Data. Let’s get to it…
Leigh Dodds and Ian Davis (both of Talis?) have put the Slug “scutter” up on Google code. It seems that this isn’t a new project (the docs refer to Feb. 2006), but its existence on Google seems to be recent. Java and Jena it would appear.
Last week I mentioned couple of ISWC 2008 award winners. Well, the conference page now has the complete list up. Congratulations to all the participants. And even if you didn’t win, the fact that you even tried makes you a winner in my book. Or something. Nevermind.
Zach Beauvais (another Talisian?!?), found to a really cool project that uses geo-data from flickr images to create fairly accurate bounding-shapes for geographical places. While not semantic web in itself, it’s a good example why exposing your data (whatever it might be) can result in the creation of something useful that you may have never thought of on your own. So if you “bring out yer data”, someone, somewhere, sometime will probably build something cool with it.
Bob DuCharme is (I’ll give you three guesses…) playing with SPARQL some more! I think he likes it! This week, he’s figuring out how many degrees Actor-Y is from Actor-Z using the Linked Movie Database. Fun stuff.
Bob’s post resulted in an interesting comment from Glenn McDonald. He mentioned that while the SPARQL was all well and good, it was insanely verbose, and hinted that he’s working on a new path based query language that might apply to RDF? He gave some examples:
“actors who have appeared in a movie with Kevin Bacon”:
Actor:=Kevin Bacon.Movie.Actor
“actors who have appeared in both a John Waters movie and a Steven Spielberg movie”:
Actor:(.Movie.Director:=John Waters:=Steven Spielberg)
“actors who have appeared in Woody Allen movies”:
Director:=Woody Allen.Movie.Actor
Interesting, no?
The Semantic Web has officially become mainstream, with the announcement of “Semantic Web for Dummies“. Really. I’m not shitting you. This is a good thing I suppose. But it reminds me of those times back in high school when the band I was really into and thought nobody else would ever listen to (Bad Brains, Descendants, Danzig, Slayer, Megadeth, etc. etc.), starting going mainstream. Soul crushing! Look for Microsoft Front Page - Semantic Web Edition in late Spring 2009!
This isn’t a new page, but I just stumbled across it the other day: Video Lectures - Semantic Web. On this page there are, obviously, video lectures about the Semantic Web. Social Web, Semantic Mining, Rules and other topics. I looks like these are keynotes and/or presentations from various ESWC conferences over the last three years.
Software Engineering Radio has a podcast with Jim Hendler of RPI, where he discusses RDF, OWL, AI, SPARQL, GRDDL and inference engines amoung other topics.
Primal Fusion is looking for a Semantic Web Technology Specialist. Apparently, these guys are building something around digitizing your thoughts into thought networks or some such. Not a lot of detail on their site. Does anyone know anything about them?
Juice from Linkool Labs is a Firefox 3 plugin that seems to be a competitor to the just released Glue from AdaptiveBlue. Juice will look up stuff related to text that you highlight and drag. For example, in their demo video, they highlight the text “Tina Fey”, and the Juice sidebar fills up with all sorts of stuff: wikipedia entry, blogs, pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Additionally, you can save images and video in your own personal library, a-la Twine. Though it seems to be lacking the social aspect that Glue provides, it still looks quite interesting. If you’re a FF3 user, give it a shot…
Standards
The RDFs spec is now available in French. O-la-la!
A new paper on OWL is out, authored by Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik, Bijan Parsia, Peter Patel-Schneider and Ulrike Sattler. OWL 2: The next step for OWL.
Since achieving W3C recommendation status in 2004, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) has been successfully applied to many problems in computer science. Practical experience with OWL has been quite positive in general; however, it has also revealed room for improvement in several areas. We systematically analyze the identified short-comings of OWL, such as expressivity issues, problems with its syntaxes, and deficiencies in the definition of OWL species. Furthermore, we present an overview of OWL 2—an extension to and revision of OWL that is currently being developed within the W3C OWL Working Group. Many aspects of OWL have been thoroughly reengineered in OWL 2, thus producing a robust platform for future development of the language.
Conferences
Calais is holding a contest during Mashup Camp. The goal is to use Calais in a news delivery/display application, business application, or “other”. The best mashup for each category wins a monster 4TB Drobo NAS!
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