triple|scape

Time once again for another fabulously informative edition of The Week in Linked Data. Let’s get to it…

Miscellaneous

• First, a personal note. I’m looking for some consulting work. Generally I’ve been working from home, but I’m willing to travel pretty much anywhere where I won’t be killed for being an American. If you have some SemWeb/LOD development or professional services work you need done, please ping me!
• Richard Hancock (no link to him in the article?) has an article over at DevX called “Why Migrate to the Semantic Web“. In it, he briefly describes some of the benefits that semantic technology brings to ordinary applications. For example; social networking, domain modeling, concept clarification, data augmentation, collaboration and reasoning.
• Paul Miller of Talis and ZDNet fame has a new blog called “Cloud of Data” in which he’s exploring the integration of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. Could Cloud Computing be the peanut-butter to the Semantic Web’s chocolate? It would seem that they would be very complimentary (vital?) technologies in turning the web into a giant distributed database. I’m looking forward to what Paul has to say on this.
• Dapper announced MashupAds this week. MashupAds is an add engine that produces ads based on contextual information in page on which it’s displayed. In short, it takes some snippet of your web page (that you define, I believe), and generates a widget containing ads that are contextual relevant to the snippet you defined. Looks interesting I suppose.

  (Warning: Rant ahead) But I wonder about these kinds of things. I mean, just because I’m on your site doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m interested in what you’re talking about. I might just be there in passing, or to look something up for my wife. If you want to make a killing on advertising, ask me what I’m interested in. Then have ads related to my interests follow me around wherever I go on the web. Danny Ayers and I talked about this some a few years ago; putting my FOAF URL in a HTTP header and letting the website fetch my FOAF, find my interests and return advertising that is relevant to me, not to the site that I just happen to be on.

• Jeen Broekstra has an update on his Sesame 2 Windows client. It’s now supporting a SKOS hierarchy browser.
  
• Alexandre Passant over at DERI has a new iPhone based Linked Data browser out call iLOD. Actually, it’s not a native iPhone application, but a web site that is optimized for the iPhone. Regardless, it works really well! Here are some screenshots of me exploring dbpedia’s Linked_Data resource:
  

  iLOD iPhone Linked Data Browser

  No iPhone? No problem. Just open the site in Safari and it works great.

• Clark and Parsia’s Pellet v2.0 RC3 is now available. You can get the list of changes/fixes here.
• Kevin Kelly has a good, forward looking video on TED where he discusses the web’s next 5000 days. In a nutshell, a) today’s web will be re-engineered into smaller chunks of data and re-cast into the web of data and b) any device or thing with even the most modest computing power will web enabled . Additionally, he points that that the things that we thought would be impossible back when the web was just a baby have now come true. And the things people think are impossible today (like the semantic web, web of data, whatever), are most certainly going to be achieved. And I agree!
• Benjamin “Another Day, Another Cool Thing” Nowack annouced poshRDF. It’s a parser that converts the most popular (and apparently ad-hoc?) microformats to RDF.
• I know some of you are involved with library related information retrieval work, so I thought I’d mention the Reference Extract project. Being developed by the Online Computer Library Center, it’s a search engine, but it’s Librarian powered. You enter some search term and the results are returned and weighted towards the sites that are most often referred to by librarians at major institutions such as the Library of Congress. They are looking for help getting the system up and running. So if you’re a Librarian or interested in Library Science, you might want to head on over and see how you might contribute.
• Hank Williams has a problem. Specifically, the lack of UI/UX work being done in the semantic web space. I couldn’t agree more! If Tabulator continues to be held up as the de-facto tool for browsing linked data, we’re screwed. Now, there are a few gems out there I admit. But generally speaking, I think we can probably all agree that the linked data movement has focused almost exclusively on the hard science while ignoring the soft. How can we fix this? How can we engage the UX community to get involved? I want my Minority Report-style LOD browser, damnit!:)

Specifications

• Nothing? Didn’t come across one darn thing this week. Ping me if you know of something and I’ll update the post.

Conferences

• VoCamp Galway 2008. VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. I suspect some drinking will also occur.
• OIC 2008: ONTOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY - Toward Effective Exploitation and Integration of Intelligence Resources. George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. December 3-4, 2008. Sounds very cloak-and-dagger!
• ESWC 2009 CALL FOR TUTORIAL PROPOSALS . 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2009) 31 May - 4 June 2009, Heraklion, Greece.

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!

 

Welcome to another edition of The Week in Linked Data. Hope you had a fun Halloween. And, that pumpkin. Is that kick-ass, or what? Anyway, let’s get to it…

Miscellaneous

• AdaptiveBlue raises US$4.5 million dollars in a Series B round of financing from RRE Ventures and Union Square Ventures. And they released Glue, a Firefox extension which will tell you a) what books, movies, stocks, wine or restaurants are mentioned on the current page, b) which of your friends recently visited this page, c) where your friends went after reading this page and d) whether your friends liked the movie, book, wine, etc. Apparently it finds your “friends” from Facebook and/or Twitter. Indicating your preference for something will broadcast it via Twitter or Tumblr to your friends.

  Now I’m assuming there is some semantic technologies behind Glue. But when I asked Alex Iskold about that, I just got a non-answer. Oh well.

  Update: Alex got back to me on the semantics-in-Glue question:

  I must have missed your question about Glue & semantics. Yes absolutely, Glue is leveraging AdaptiveBlue’s core semantic technology to recognize things across the web. The process boils down to “knowing” that a page is about, for example, a movie and then knowing which movie it is. Specifically, Glue “knows” that Dark Knight on IMDB is the same Dark Night movie as on Fandango and other popular movie sites.

  Thanks for the clarification Alex!

• Bob DuCharme has put together a nice little web application that will turn your SPARQL query results into a spreadsheet.
• Freebase is now providing Linked Data access to the masses. From their website, “This service generates views of Freebase Topics following the principles of Linked Data. You can obtain an RDF representation of a Topic by sending a simple GET request to http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/thetopicid, where the “thetopicid” is a Freebase identifier with the slashes replaced by dots. For instance to see “/en/blade_runner” represented in RDF request http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.blade_runner”. You can see the triples with a simple web browser by replacing /ns to /rdf in the URL. Otherwise, it’ll do the content-negotiation dance to get your HTML or RDF, depending on your agent’s preference. Cool!
• STI International has opened a kind of social network for “experts in Semantic technologies”. Not exactly sure what the point is here, except maybe they’re trying to grow a community around their service offerings? Le me know in the comments if you have any visibility into this…
• Orri Erling of OpenLink defends some criticism of OpenLink and Virtuoso that came up during the Vienna Linked Data Practitioners meeting. I wasn’t there (I never get to leave the house), so I’m not privy to what was said, or the context in which it was said, so I can’t really comment. Just thought I’d point it out.

Standards

• Nothing that I found. Everyone’s too busy conferencing this week I suppose.

Conferences

• Benjamin Nowack won in the ISWC2008 open track for paggr. Congrats Bengee! Now, where’s my invite, huh?
• I believe the ISWeb Reasearch Group (University of Koblenz, Germany) won the billion triples challenge with Semaplorer. Video demonstration can be found here. Congratulations to Simon Schenk, Carsten Saathoff, Anton Baumesberger, Frederick Jochum, Alexander Kleinen, Ansgar Scherp and Steffen Staab! (sorry if I missed anyone)
• Ora Lassila gave a couple of keynotes this week “Some Personal Thoughts on Semantic Web and Non-Symbolic AI” at URSW2008. and for PICKME08, “Does your Mobile Device Need to Be Socially Aware? A Semantic Web Perspective“.
• Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Uli Sattler won for best paper at ISWC2008. The paper was entitled “Laconic and Precise Justifications for OWL“. I tried to read it, but once the the pages became filled with Greek characters, I quickly gave up. Logic is hard. Let’s go shopping!
• Update:Ivan Herman has a review of ISCW2008.

A fine Saturday to ya. This weeks TWILD is a bit shorter than the previous for a few reasons; I’m just not feelin’ it today, and there just didn’t seem to be much going on. Nevertheless, here ’tis. Have a great weekend!

Miscellaneous

• OMG! OMG! OMG! Twine went 1.0 this week. I tried it for a bit, but it was so slow that I quickly gave up. Head honcho Nova Spivak indicates that they’re doing some server performance work and it should be better soon. I sure hope so…been looking forward to this for quite a while.
• Bob DuCharme has a nice write-up of using D2RQ to query a relational database. I’ve had only one go at D2RQ and it ended in a crash while trying to generate mappings. In fairness, the database I was pointing it at had >350 tables and about 500M records it it. Maybe I’ll look at it again, with a more modest DB.
• Tom Heath over at Talis submitted an article to IEEE Internet Computing called How Will We Interact With the Web of Data. It’s a good article, and clearly lays out some of the challenges that a linked data browser implementation would face. Though I always sigh a little after reading these kinds of papers about semantic UX. I understand that it’s a tough nut to crack, but I’d rather see some pictures or flash mockups of the ideas that are presented, rather than hand-wavy ideas. Just sayin’.
• Lee Feigenbaum over at Cambridge Semantics has put up a video of Anzo for Excel. This is the first I’ve heard of Anzo, and I have admit that I was pretty impressed by the video demonstration. From what I can tell, the product lets you “semantify” and share spreadsheet information as well as fold in data from enterprise databases. The demonstration make it look super simple, but the geek in me wants to know more about what’s going on behind the scenes. Any info on this?
• Lost Boy Leigh Dodds has a great blog post called Explaining REST and Hypertext: SPAM-E and the Spam Cleaning Robot.. An exploration of REST interactions from a client-centric point of view. I have to admit that after reading this post, and the Roy Fielding post that inspired it, my interpretation of REST has totally been turned on its head. Both are must-reads.

Specifications

• Adobe has released an new XMP specification. I’m not a “media” guy (images, audio, video, etc.) so I think I can probably safely ignore this, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. Oh, and apparently they neglected to give it a version number of some sort., which is usually Not Good.

Conferences

• Lot of ‘em going on in Europe this week and next. I’m too depressed to talk about it since I’m not attending any of them. Check PlanetRDF instead.

Happy Saturday folks. Here’s this week’s installment of TWILD. As always, if you’ve got a suggestion, correction, or something you think I should include, please hit me in the comments.

Micellaneous

• Siri is a stealth mode startup that was spun out of SRI’s CALO project. No real details yet, but they’ve secured $8.5 million in Series A funding. Could this be the commercialization of Open IRIS? Also, wasn’t Radar Networks involved in CALO? Are they also involved with Siri in some capacity?
• Scientific American has posted a new article authored by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt which discuses the new discipline of Web Science. This new area of study seems to focus on observing the emergent characteristics of the web as it evolves, and using those observations to further develop the web in the areas of privacy, trust, intellectual property rights are more. I wonder how long it will be before a major university offers a degree in this field.
• ReadWriteWeb asked for comments about “What’s Next After Web 2.0“. On the semantics front, Mark Johnson of Microsoft suggested that, “if Web 1.0 was about Read and Web 2.0 was about Read/Write, then Web 3.0 should be about Read/Write/Understand”. Yessir. Other quotes include “monetizing data, versus monetizing pages” and “the web will give me tangental possibilities”. Lots of other comments there too that are not semantic web related per se, but very interesting nonetheless. Go check it out.
• Andreas Blumauer and Tassilo Pellegrini of the Semantic Web Company have edited a new book called “Social Semantic Web“. From the description of the book, “This volume introduces the technological, organizational and cultural changes that are associated with the Social Semantic Web. It puts decision makers and developers in a position where they are able to assess the implications of these technologies for their company or institution (publication in German).”. German? Doh! Guess I won’t be picking up a copy. Any plans for an English version?
• Semantic Universe has announced a series of free webcasts by James Hendler of RPI and Dean Allemang (TopQuadrant). These are the guys who write “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist” (which is a great book, btw). Anywho, the topics covered appear to be “Semantic Web Overview”, “Semantic Web Languages” and Semantic Web In Use”. From the titles, it seems that these recordings might constitute a “gentle introduction” and probably not all that interesting for those that have worked with the technology for awhile. But if you have a co-worker or boss that hasn’t drank the semantic web kool-aid yet, this might be a good first introduction for them.
• Project10X has released their “Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 and Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities”. 721 pages, 400 illustrations. $3,495 USD. Wait…what? Are you shitting me? $3,495 USD? Oh, wait. You can get the 32 page “Web 3.0 Manifesto” for only $495 USD. Again, are you shitting me?
• Idea is about to release Spicy Nodes, a new toolkit for data visualization. Information is represented as interconnected nodes in a virtual space. The UI shows how information items are related to one another and provides the ability to drill down for more information. I have no idea if it’s RDF based or not. But it might be worth keeping this on your radar.
• The OUseful.Info blog describes a method for converting a Wikipedia table into linked data. In short, the author scrapes a Wikipedia table using Google Spreadsheet’s importHTML(url,query,index) function. The spreadsheet is then exposed as a CSV. Yahoo Pipes then takes the CSV and massages it a bit. Then shows the data in a Yahoo Map. The Yahoo Map exports KML, which can then be fed into Google Maps. Pretty darn cool!
• Bob DuCharme has posted about new a white paper he’s written called “Content Metadata Standards: Libraries, Publishers and More. It’s free (hello, Project10x?), with registration. Bob describes the main points as Dublin Core the Library of Congress’ MARC standard, and some other industry specific vocabularies.
• I asked Guy Kawasaki, creator of Alltop, if he’d consider creating a space for semantic web information. For example, semanticweb.alltop.com. His response? “we only do topics with business models. “. Ouch.

Specifications

• RDFa is now a W3C Recommendation. Published by the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML2 Working group, “RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing” specifies how publishers can express structured data within XHTML documents. Nice job folks! Also, the RDFa Primer was updated.
• SIOC is now OWL-DL. In order to make this happen, a number of changes to the SIOC core ontology were made. I won’t enumerate the changes, but you can find them here.

Conferences

• The ISWC 2008 Posters and Demos are now available online.
• The Workshop on the Future of Social Networking will be held on January 15-16 in Barcelona Spain. The list of topics include interoperability, referrals/invitations, user experience, identify federation, privacy, location and cross-platform (pc, web, mobile) issues.
• The Semantic Wiki Community will be holding a BoF meeting on Sunday October 26, after the ISWC program. Lightning talks, open discussion and more. More details, including RSVP, lightning talk suggestions and more can be found here.

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/.

Danny Ayers put out a call for volunteers to help with his weekly This Week’s Semantic Web posting. Lots going on out there in semantic web land (or linked data land if you prefer) and, having a job, he’s feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I said I’d take a shot at pitching in.

In that effort, I’m starting my own weekly post which I hope Danny will include in TWSW as much as he likes. I’ll post my first article on Sunday, and with any luck, every Sunday thereafter.

See you Sunday!