se.m.edia

Ever have wondered if there is something around like a command line for the Semantic Web? An online tool that allows you load and query a range of data sources? Well, peradventure Benjamin Nowack has developed a tool, called SPARQLBot, that does all this. It is really great. You launch your favourite IRC client (I use Hydra IRC) and then you (or a SPARQL geek near to you) defines a command that does something useful. Pull in some data, query it, smush it, etc.

Check it out! Play around with it. Experience how to instant-integrate data source on an RDF-basis. You will enjoy it. An example may better illustrate it: Imagine you've joined the #sparqlbot channel at irc:irc.freenode.net; you query for news (from an RSS channel):

mhausenblas>sparqlbot, load <FEEDURI>

mhausenblas>sparqlbot, news about XXX

What happens in the background is that the feed gets loaded into the store, and the command triggers a SPARQL query:

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?o WHERE {
  ?item a rss:item ; ?p ?o .
  FILTER REGEX(?o, "$1", "i")
}

Isn't that great? I experienced it today. It really rocks :) You can add your own commands (given some basic SPARQL knowledge) and extend the bot's intelligence. Not to mention that this nice tool (being based on ARC2) even understands RDFa - very nice, indeed (try also the 'sw faq command'). However, the name SPARQLBot is to modest, IMHO. It is THE Semantic Web command line!

The goal of the LDOW08 workshop (at WWW08, April 22, 2008
Beijing, China)  is to provide a forum for the Linked Data community, in which participants can:

• present and discuss approaches to publishing Linked Data on the Web;
• showcase innovative applications that consume Linked Data;
• shape the agenda and identify upcoming research issues for the next development stage of the Web of Data.

Deadline: 2008-01-28

Did you know that the Zitgist RDF browser actually supports RDFa? This is to say you can feed the browser with XHTML+RDFa (see example) and it will render it! 

Ok. It has some minor hiccups (seems to duplicate each prop) ... but hey ... it's a start.

I can see many valid things in Keith's post about uF and the Semantic Web (like 'Things have URIs'), but I like most his conclusion:

So in other words, Microformats are not, in themselves, building, or contributing to, the semantic web. They can be made to join the semantic web, but this requires extra effort on the part of individual authors – it does not come ‘for free’ when ‘doing microformats’. 

Tim Finin recently announced a new version of Swoogle, THE Semantic Web search engine. After some initial hiccups the service now seems to work fine, again. Thanks to the UMBC eBiquity team, you're doing a great job!

One thing puzzles me. Though I read the manual (which seems a bit outdated), I did not figure out how to find certain instances. Take for example the query 'return all documents that have a foaf:mbox = abc@example.org in it'. I'll continue the experiments ;) 

Two new RDFa applications are available:

• Ben has announced a new Bookmarklets and RDFa Web Clipboard;
• I've put an alpha version of a FOAF-RDFa generator, called FOAFr, online.

Check it out ;)

W3C prepares for Scripting for the Semantic Web:

The W3C Semantic Web Activity is considering whether to propose further work specifying a standard Applications Programming Interface (API) for people writing Semantic Web applications in Javascript running in browsers. Before engaging, possibly, in drafting a charter to be then submitted to W3C members, W3C would like to solicit input from the developers' community. An interactive questionnaire was therefore set up at:

http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/semweb-js-api/

to collect community input. W3C would appreciate if interested developers filled the questionnaire to promote consensus on this issue.

BTW: The 3rd Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web is colocated with ESWC 2007. June 6 or 7, 2007 Innsbruck, Austria.

Quoting Kjetil Kjernsmo from the W3C SWEO IG

Many of you probably know allready, but I hope to spread this as widely as possible:

In the Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group, we decided that an important part of spreading SW is to create useful applications that can make a difference to a lot of people, and so, we came up with this:

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects

The goal is to gather programmers allready interested in semweb
technology around a few projects. It is not a competition, like the Semantic Web Challenge, we just want to get the great minds together.

Please propose projects and spread the questionnaire to others that may be interested.

Now, this is really good news: Flickr is rolling out a new feature called machine tags that allows users to be more precise in how they tag, and how they search, their photos.

Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag; they have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.), and the predicate is the name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc).

When Seth states that "[...] Microformats have succeeded here, allowing me to very easily embed metadata into XHTML.", I'd like to reply: You can virtually embed RDF into (X)HTML using RDFa; just as easy as that + you get: multiple Vocs in one place via namespaces, one-tool-for-all-formats, etc.

Want to try out? Go have a look at RDFa bookmarklets. 

Reading a review of a new media service called Ookles (to be launched soon) that among other things offers facial and object recognition and an automatic organization of your photos + some kind of intelligent automatic tagging for your media, I am eager to see it working ... and might want to know what kind of technology they use?

BTW: Ookles = Flickr+Riya+YouTube ...

Reading Tim Finin on SW patents I thought: Wow, the SW has grown up! BTW: I wasn't aware that Google was offering a search on patents. Now, just to give you an idea - when Tim reports that Google finds some 300 patents that contain "ontology", look at the following numbers:

• SQL ... 616
• HTML ... 1064
• "web service" ... 626

Finally, NM2 goes public: DVB-T war gestern - die Zukunft liegt im interaktiven Fernsehen. Mehr: JR-Presseaussendung ...