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Earlier today I posted over on O’Reilly’s net regarding the current Web being incomplete without the Web of Data. Quite a couple of people commented on it (thanks, btw) both on the blog and on #swig. Ah. And not to forget: The issue really was about that the Web of Data is a fundamental part of the Web and hence I don't worry too much what label we put on the jar ;)
So, yesterday it became reality ;) XHTML+RDFa is finally a W3C Candidate Recommendation (CR) - more details available from the W3C news page.
In case you have an RDFa implementation ready, please let us know.
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!
So finally we did it: Today we released the alpha version of riese, the 'RDFizing and Interlinking the EuroStat Data Set Effort'. Deploying linked-data using XHTML+RDFa is quite a new idea. We combined it with what we call User Contributed Interlinking, i.e. let user add semantic links in a Wiki-style manner. Check it out!
Btw, thanks Danny for your nice post on riese :)
Fabien, you're simply the best: Your RDFa tutorial rocks!
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:
Deadline: 2008-01-28
SPARQL, the query language for the Semantic Web is a W3C Proposed Recommendation, finally.
Kudos to Eric, Kendall, Lee, Elias and everybody who made it possible :)
As Mark pointed it out on his blog: RDFa is about to lift-off! Quick links:
Take a look at it and start playing around ;)
Just to let you know - in case you do research in the field of media semantics, multimedia ontologies, annotation and extraction, you might want to contemplate submitting your work to one of the following workshops (collocated with SAMT07):
Congrats to Dan Connolly and the GRDDL WG. Today the Semantic Web Activity News announced the GRDDL Recommendation status; see also:
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’.
The RDFa-deployed Multimedia Metadata (ramm.x) activity has been launched:
With ramm.x we aim at enabling existing multimedia metadata formats to enter the Semantic Web [...] ramm.x targets at self-descriptive media asset descriptions allowing to apply the follow-your-nose principle.
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 ;)
The most enjoyable and understandable introduction to the Semantic Web I came across for ages was given by Stefano Mazzocchi at the ApacheCON 2007:
A no-nonsense introduction to "semantic web" technologies
The so-called "Semantic Web" is a vision for an evolution of the web where web sites expose data not only for direct human consumption (as it is mostly the case today) but also for specific software agents to consume, aggregate and enrich on behalf of humans. In this presentation, I will show an outline of this vision, together with a simple and concise description of each W3C recommendation (such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL) that are involved and how they are supposed to work together. I will also show the differences and similarities between this and other models for purer-data interchange on the web (such as "web 2.0" and "atom/rss") and will demo existing solution that are based on semantic web technologies.
Quoting Brady Forrest on O'Reilly Radar:
At various times I have had to explain what a wiki is to people and I rarely do a good job. In the future I may just show them Lee & Sachi LeFever's video Wikis in Plain English. It does a really good job of explaining why and how someone would want to us a wiki. They doing a good job of keeping the vocabulary on the easily-understood side of tech. If you ever need to explain RSS they have a video for that too.
Just browsed through flickr's services, and found:
http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr
This nice litte gadget allows for retrieving photos by either sketching them or uploading a reference image. Fun, fast, and addictive ;)
As recently announced in Andy Seaborne's blog, SPARQL is now also capable of manipulating RDF graphs:
SPARQL/Update is a language that takes the SPARQL style, and much of the grammar, and provides both graph update and graph management operations.
Kudos to Andy and Geetha!
Two new RDFa applications are available:
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).
We invite anyone interested to look at
http://www.ist-nm2.org/ShapeShiftedTV-tutorial/
where we'll give an overview on non-linear, interactive movie production.
A new Wikipedia search engine, Wikiseek, is avialable:
"WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess."
Just came accross Disco - Hyperdata Browser.
Looks nice ;)
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.
