Planet RDF

Unfortunately, I could only spend 4 days at the recent WWW2008 event in Beijing (I departed the morning following the Linked Data Workshop), so I couldn't take my slot on the "Commercializing the Semantic Web panel" etc.. Anyway, thanks to the Web I can still inject my points of view in the broad Web based discourse. Well so I hoped, when I attempted to post a comment to Paul Miller's ZDNet domain hosted blog thread titled: Commercialising the Semantic Web.

Unfortunately, the cost of completing ZDNet's unwieldy signup process simply exceeded the benefits of dropping my comments in their particular space :-( Thus, I'll settle for a trackback ping instead.

What follows is the cut and paste of my intended comment contributions to Paul's post.

Paul,

As discussed earlier this week during our podcast session, commercialization of Semantic Web technology shouldn't be a mercurial matter at this stage in the game :-) It's all about looking at how it provides value :-)

From the Linked Data angle, the ability to produce, dispatch, and exploit "Context" across an array of "Perspectives" from a plethora of disparate data sources on the Web and/or behind corporate firewalls, offers immense commercial value.

Yahoo's Searchmonkey effort will certainly bring clarity to some of the points I made during the podcast re. the role of URIs as "value consumption tickets" (Data Services are exposed via URIs). There has to be a trigger (in user space) that compels Web users to seek broader, or simply varied, perspectives as a response to data encountered on the Web. Yahoo! is about to put this light on in a big way (imho).

The "self annotating" nature of the Web is what ultimately drives the manifestation of the long awaited Semantic Web. I believe I postulated about "Self Annotation & the Semantic Web" in a number of prior posts which, by the way, should be DataRSS compatible right now due to Yahoo's support of OpenSearch Data Providers (which this Blog Space has been for eons).

Today, have many communities adding strucuture to the Web (via their respective tools of preference) without explicitly realizing what they are contributing. Every RSS/Atom feed, Tag, Weblog, Shared Bookmark, Wikiword, Microformat, Microformat++ (eRDF or RDFa), GRDDL stylesheet, and RDFizer etc.. is a piece of structured data.

Finally, the different communities are all finding ways to work together (thank heavens!) and the results are going to be cataclysmic when it all plays out :-)

Data, Structure, and Extraction are the keys to the Semantic Life! First you get the Data in a container (information resource), and then you add Structure to the information resource (RSS, Atom, microformats, RDFa, eRDF, SIOC, FOAF, etc.), once you have Structure RDFization (i.e. transformation to Linked Data) is a synch thanks to RDF Middleware (as per earlier RDF middleware posts).

Issue 2 of Nodalities Magazine is now available online. For those who have signed up to the free subscription, your printed copy is in the mail.

Items this month include:

• Blue Oceans - Ian Davis and Zach Beauvais discuss the ‘Blue Ocean’ opportunity facing those who embrace the Semantic Web
• Social Networking - Garlik CEO Tom Ilube introduces the notion of ’social verification’
• Environment - David Peterson puts semantic technologies to work in the fight against Climate Change
• Predictable Mavericks - Talis CEO Dave Errington looks back at the company’s past, and forward to a semantically powered future
• Open World Thinking - Nadeem Shabir argues that Semantic Web developers need to see the world differently
• Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters - Read transcripts of recent conversations with these factual information powerhouses, and learn how the Semantic Web is being put to work.

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Unfortunately, I could only spend 4 days at the recent WWW2008 event in Beijing (I departed the morning following the Linked Data Workshop), so I couldn't take my slot on the "Commercializing the Semantic Web panel" etc.. Anyway, thanks to the Web I can still inject my points of view in the broad Web based discourse. Well so I hoped, when I attempted to post a comment to Paul Miller's ZDNet domain hosted blog thread titled: Commercialising the Semantic Web.

Unfortunately, the cost of completing ZDNet's unwieldy signup process simply exceeded the benefits of dropping my comments in their particular space :-( Thus, I'll settle for a trackback ping instead.

What follows is the cut and paste of my intended comment contributions to Paul's post.

Paul,

As discussed earlier this week during our podcast session, commercialization of Semantic Web technology shouldn't be a mercurial matter at this stage in the game :-) It's all about looking at how it provides value :-)

From the Linked Data angle, the ability to produce, dispatch, and exploit "Context" across an array of "Perspectives" from a plethora of disparate data sources on the Web and/or behind corporate firewalls, offers immense commercial value.

Yahoo's Searchmonkey effort will certainly bring clarity to some of the points I made during the podcast re. the role of URIs as "value consumption tickets" (Data Services are exposed via URIs). There has to be a trigger (in user space) that compels Web users to seek broader, or simply varied, perspectives as a response to data encountered on the Web. Yahoo! is about to put this light on in a big way (imho).

The "self annotating" nature of the Web is what ultimately drives the manifestation of the long awaited Semantic Web. I believe I postulated about "Self Annotation & the Semantic Web" in a number of prior posts which, by the way, should be DataRSS compatible right now due to Yahoo's support of OpenSearch Data Providers (which this Blog Space has been for eons).

Today, have many communities adding strucuture to the Web (via their respective tools of preference) without explicitly realizing what they are contributing. Every RSS/Atom feed, Tag, Weblog, Shared Bookmark, Wikiword, Microformat, Microformat++ (eRDF or RDFa), GRDDL stylesheet, and RDFizer etc.. is a piece of structured data.

Finally, the different communities are all finding ways to work together (thank heavens!) and the results are going to be cataclysmic when it all plays out :-)

Data, Structure, and Extraction are the keys to the Semantic Life! First you get the Data in a container (information resource), and then you add Structure to the information resource (RSS, Atom, microformats, RDFa, eRDF, SIOC, FOAF, etc.), once you have Structure RDFization (i.e. transformation to Linked Data) is a synch thanks to RDF Middleware (as per earlier RDF middleware posts).

May’s Semantic Web Gang show was just published, and features a good discussion with Dr Barney Pell, CTO of Powerset. Powerset launched a public beta at the start of this week, and Barney shares some of the company’s experiences of a week in the public eye.

Have a listen; it’s a good’un. Biased? Moi?

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My podcast interview with Paul Miller of Talis is out. As I listened to the podcast (naturally awkward affair) I got a first hand sense of Paul's mastery of the art of interviewing, even when dealing with a fast talking data blitzers like me. Personally, I think I still talk a little too fast (the Nigerian in me), especially when the subject matter hones right into the epicenter of my professional passions: Open Data Access and Heterogeneous Data Integration (aka. Virtual Database Technology) -- so you may need to rewind every now and then during the interview :-)

During this particular podcast interview, I deliberately wanted to have an conversation about the practical value of Linked Data, rather than the technical innards. The fundamental utility of Linked Data remains somewhat mercurial, and I am certainly hoping to do my bit at the upcoming Linked Data Planet conference re. demonstrating and articulating linked data value across the blurring realms of "the individual" and "the enterprise".

Note to my old schoolmates on Facebook: when you listen to this podcast you will at least reconcile "Uyi Idehen" with "Kingsley Idehen". Unfortunately, Facebook refuses to let me Identify myself in the manner I choose. Ideally, I would like to have the name: "Kingsley (Uyi) Idehen" associated with my Facebook ID since this is the Identifier known to my personal network of friends, family, and old schoolmates. This Identity predicament is a long running Identity case study in the making.

I'll be heading to SemTech this weekend and am looking forward to meeting a lot of new people and seeing a lot of familiar, friendly faces. I'm particularly excited about the presentation that I'll be giving on Wednesday morning. In conjunction with Brand NIemann of the U.S. EPA, I'll be demonstrating some of the work that Cambridge Semantics has been doing to work with spreadsheets as a first-class source of semantic data. Our team has done a fantastic job building a user experience that's tightly integrated into Excel, and in doing so has provided a very easy way to free information from the confines of the spreadsheet.

I'm going to show a few different scenarios that involve linking data between different spreadsheets, reusing spreadsheet data on the Web, keeping live data updated in real-time, and more. Much of the presentation and demonstration is in the context of the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract, and I'll also be showing how the same software can be applied to conference data from SemTech itself.

If you're planning to be at SemTech next week, please drop me a note so that I can come and say hi there. And if you are there, please come and see my presentation:

Title: Getting to Web Semantics for Spreadsheets in the U.S. Government
Day: Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Time: 08:30 AM - 09:30 AM

In our latest podcast I talk with Kingsley Idehen, President and CEO of OpenLink Software. We discuss OpenLink’s approach, and the role that semantic technologies play in this, before turning to a broader discussion of Linked Data; a movement with which Kingsley has been closely involved.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• 4GL
• Tim Berners-Lee keynote, WWW2008, Beijing
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data principles
• Dataportability
• DBpedia
• Orri Erling
• Giant Global Graph
• GRDDL
• JDBC
• Kubl
• Linked Data
• Linked Data on the Web workshop
• Linked Data Planet
• Microformats
• ODBC
• OLE DB
• OpenLink Dataspaces
• OpenLink Software
• Oracle
• Postgres
• RDF
• SPARQL
• Sybase
• UMBEL
• Unisys
• Virtuoso (and its history)
• Wikipedia
• WWW2007, Banff, Canada
• WWW2008, Beijing, China
• XMLA
• Zitgist

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 13 May, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband. Thanks are due to Andrew Peterson for his advice on editing the audio.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

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Nova Spivack has just penned a post titled: On the Difference Between "Semantic" and "Semantic Web", where he covers the fundamental difference between "Semantic" (what I call "Semantics Inside") and "Semantic Web" applications. I would like to extend the distinctions further by adding the "Linked Data Web" distinctions to the developing discourse.

The Linked Data Web (aka. Linked Data) describes RDF data injected into the Web, where the Data Object Identifiers (URIs) in an RDF graph (collection of RDF triples) are endowed with HTTP based URIs. The net effect of this approach to Data Object Identity is that it facilitates "Open Data Access by Reference" on the Web (aka data dereferencing).

If you recall pre Web ubiquity, in the enterprise realm for instance, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) emerged as a mechanism for separating Data Access and Data Management in the database oriented Client-Sever model. Although ODBC gave you access to data, the data access entry point took the form of a data access specific naming mechanism called a "Data Source Name" (DSN). ODBC DSNs typically exposed Tables or Views. The same thing applies to JDBC where a non HTTP based URN scheme applies.

Zip forward to where we are today on the Web; the Web is evolving from a Document centric Database to a Distributed Object Database, and you should see that in Linked Data we are now truly looking at the best of all worlds: Web Open Database Connectivity (WODBC) with the following advantages:

To conclude, we now have "Semantics Inside" (RDF or non RDF), "Semantic Web" (RDF graphs with Object Identifiers that may or may not be HTTP based), and "Linked Data Web" (RDF graphs with Object Identifiers that must be HTTP based and dereferencable) oriented applications, in the emerging landscape associated with the "Semantics" moniker.

As per usual, this post is a record in my Blog oriented Data Space on the Web. The permalink of this post is a URI constructed with Giant Global Graph enrichment in mind :-)

In R.U.R. (Rossum´s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, Dr. Hellman, Psychologist-in-Chief, says:

Dr. Hellman (at door, left) Music is a wonderful thing, you know. You should have been listening. There's something ennobling about it, soothing …

We like it too. The Web has given a unique opportunity for everyone to link data, to share, to reuse and create. BBC is one of my favourite source of news. I like their site and I like their mission statement. Tom Scott (BBC Radio Labs) says in a blog post on helping machines play with programmes.

As part of our work on developing BBC Programmes we have been looking at how we can make the data available for other development teams outside the BBC.

and

We have been following the Linked Data approach - namely thinking of URIs as more than just locations for documents. Instead using them to identify anything, from a particular person to a particular programme. These resources in-turn have representations, which can be machine-processable (through the use of RDF, Microformats, RDFa, etc.), and these representations can hold links towards further web resources, allowing agents to jump from one dataset to another.

He is asking the community for comments around the RDF version of their schedules before publishing them along the other formats. There is also a cool demo which sends you notification of programme start. It should not be too hard to plug that into a Jabber client. In their demo, they are using Growl.

As in past years, the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference will recognize the best student papers submitted to the research track. A short list of candidates will be selected by the track co-chairs and program committee and announced shortly before the conference. The selection of the best student paper from ISWC 2008 will be made from the candidates and announced during the conference.

A student paper is defined as a paper whose first author is a full-time student when the paper is submitted. In order to be considered for this award, a paper should be identified as a student paper when it is submitted by checking off the student paper box.

If your paper qualifies as a student paper, be sure to check off the box when you submit it. Having a paper nominated for this award, let alone selected, is a distinct honor. Plus there will be prizes.

We got on the train together.  I had just finished a four-day training/consulting session with a company doing information integration for international security.  She was doing a master's degree, with a thesis about Ontologies.  Like a good grad student, she was a voratious reader.  She had read white papers, research papers, books, web pages, magazine articles, and anything else she could get her eyes on.  The more she read, the more confused she became. 

It is hard to be surprised at this.  It seem that just about everyone is jumping on the Semantics bandwagon.  Is an Ontology a top-down way to organize all human knowledge?  Or just a glorified ERD?  Or a controlled vocabulary?  Will it take an Ontologist to make them?  Or will they be something that everyone can do, like a web page?  Will Ontologies make the web come alive as a sentient, intelligent being?  You can find someone who has seriously puported variants of all of these, all using the name "Ontology".

So I just sorted it all out for her before we got to Elephant and Castle.

Well, not really.  There are just too many contradictions.  Is the Semantic Web about a top-down organization of everything?  Or a wooley free-for-all?  Are vocabularies controlled or not?  Is content authored or automatically generated?

But here's what I was able to offer.  One story, about a web of information.  A story about information sharing.  A story that builds on the success of things like Wikipedia and the World Wide Web.

In my story there is no need for natural language processing.  Inference plays a key role, but not an analytic one; it is  just a way to connect information together.  Upper ontologies are largely irrelevant, but reusable ontologies are not.

Will this technology story solve every problem?  No.  It will not diagnose diseases, it will not automatically index your library. It will not make your search engines obsolete.

But no technology story can do all that - the best we can hope for is a story that is coherent (it actually makes sense), feasible (it can be done with extant technology), and, perhaps most importantly, valuable (it provides some real business value).  I think I have such a story - and in that story, there happens to be no need for natural language processing, upper ontologies, or highly sophisticated inferencing. 

So, what is that story?  I did finish the story before we got to Elephant and Castle, but that's a 45 minute ride.  I can't fit the whole thing into a blog entry.  But I can fit it into a book. 

Yes, this whole entry was a troll for the book.  Check it out.

As John Breslin already detailed last week, we (Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars, John and myself) recently work on SMOB, a semantic microblogging architecture, that will be presented at next SFSW workshop, co-located with ESWC in Tenerife.

While there have been a lot of buzz recently regarding ways to provide open alternatives to Twitter, then fun thing is that we worked on this in last January while I visited DERI. Our main goal was to show how Semantic Web technologies could provide an open-platform for such way of publishing content, mainly using FOAF and SIOC. Moreover, one of our aim was also to demonstrate how such technologies can provide users a way to control, share and remix their data as they want, not depending on a third-party service, a goal also shared by the dataportability project. In that way, SMOB-published data really belongs to the user that wrote it. Indeed, while SMOB servers (which display a faceted view of agregated posts as you can see on the demo server) store data in their local triple-store, this information (i.e. each update) is hosted on the client side and available in RDF.

At the moment, the complete updates dataset is public, and can be browsed with any RDF browser as the picture below shows (with Tabulator) but we plan to introduce more advanced authentication and privacy issues, in which OpenID could have a role to play.

Users can parse it as any RDF data, mash-it up with other information, eg their FOAF profile (SMOB allows to re-use existing FOAF profile as the foaf:maker of each update), or any other RDF data. And most important, if a SMOB server closes, they still own their data.

Moreover, since SMOB content is SIOC-based, it becomes part of the SIOC-o-sphere, and could be merged with your other social media contributions (from any SIOC application) and discovered thanks to recent APIs and WordPress plug-in introduced by Sindice (automatic PTSW / Sindice pings will be soon in the code repository). This is one more advantage of getting a common semantics to model your data wherever they come from.

Finally, we just introduced in SMOB a way to publish not only to a dedicated server, but also to Twitter. So that you’ll get a real-time, self-hosted and long-life archive of your twits in RDF. Isn’t that cool ?

Today we announced two big changes to our commercial support plans:

1. We increased coverage to include several new products
2. We decreased prices across all four support levels

We’re expanding of our commercial support plans to include more C&P products, as well as some open source semweb pieces, too:

• Pellet, including support of Pellet apps using Jena and OWLAPI libraries
• Owlgres
• OwlSight
• JSpace
• Protege4

We’ve also gotten feedback from customers and potential customers that the price of our support offerings wasn’t in line with expectations. So we’ve adjusted the price of all four support levels significantly by doubling the number of support hours per level, which more closely mirrors what appears to be a reasonable average for complex open source project support plans.

We’re especially happy to being offering support not only for our reasoners (Pellet and Owlgres) and browsers (OwlSight and JSpace), but also for Protege4. We think its the best open source OWL ontology development environment available. We’ll be offering some commercial plugins for Protege4 in Q3 of this year.

Because some people have found it difficult to find the right submission pages with the current link structure, we decided to feature the links on the front page:

Submissions and reviewing for the different tracks and activities will be managed independently.

• Research track
• In use track
• Posters and demos
• Tutorials — submissions proposals for tutorial by 16 May via email to David Martin (martin at ai.sri.com.
• Doctoral consortium
• Semantic Web Challenge
• Workshops — the call for workshop proposals is closed. information on submissions to accepted workshops will appear here soon.
  • coming soon

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-05-12, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Another burst of activity this week around the general area of DataPortability, with announcements from MySpace, Facebook and Google regarding the opening up of social network data. While it isn’t yet clear how much better these systems will at meshing with the Giant Global Graph, it certainly seems a step in the right direction.

In the Media

• Video: Semantic Technology in Enterprise Computing
• Video: Where does the time come from? (transcript)
• Podcast: Library 2.0 Gang 05/08: ILS API
• Podcast: Peter Mika talks about SearchMonkey and the Semantic Technology Conference
• Podcast: DataPortability: In-Motion
• Slides: Golem and CrystalEye - mashing up science data
• Slides: With or Without UIDs

Docs

• Proposed Activity for Video on the Web
• Should every web page be semantic-backed?
• Peter Mika offers bananas at Yahoo! Research
• SPARQL Update to Complete RESTful SOA Scenario
• Open Notebook Science–sensemaking
• Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary 0.1, discussion
• Describing Copyright in RDF, The Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo) - also with spec in RDFa
• The Role of UMBEL: Stuck in the Middle with You . . .
• The Open Data licensing issue
• Explaining Web 1.0, Web 2.0 & Web 3.0
• XTech report
• Thoughts on DataPortability, The care and feeding of online relationships, DataPortability, SPARQL and the “Connect!” button
• MySpace joins the ’semantic’ web, Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web (Press Release), Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’

Software News

• Powerset Wikipedia/Freebase search, (review at TechCrunch)
• Prototype for distributed / decentralised microblogging using semantics
• Owlgres 0.1 - OWL reasoner using Postgres
• Server-side storage of OWL syntax
• Introducing StraightWalker - WordPress theme with semweb hooks
• baby steps at linking library data
• Dbpedia Benchmark Revisited
• processing.js, the hidden value of processing.js
• webthumb - REST API for generating thumbnails from Mozilla
• Twitter Jabber PubSub

Events etc.

• Semantic Web Meeting, Austin, 13th May
• Evening beers with Music Ontology, MusicBrainz folks, London, May 14
• SearchMonkey launch party, Yahoo!, Bay Area, May 15
• Data Sharing Workshop/Summit, Mountain View, CA, May 15
• Semantic Web Challenge - “The data set for the Billion Triples Challenge has been posted”
• 1st NEPOMUK - Social Semantic Desktop - Summer School
• 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008)
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants
• semantic-web@w3.org

Miscellany

• Teaching Kids Computer Skills and Programming
• SciSpace - social networking site for scientists
• Announcing xrdstype.net - service type registry
• The hard stuff - VRM Use Cases

Quote of the Week

the semantic web is already here if you know where to look

- Julian Higman

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the mail meor use the del.icio.us tag “TWSW” - thanks!

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According to the Web User News, MySpace plans to support Semantic Web technologies. From the article, it’s unclear exactly how the world’s largest social networking site plans to support RDF, RDFa or microformats. It may be still too early to celebrate.

At the SocialDevCamp East, we talked about the importance of Semantic Web technologies in context of social media. One question that didn’t get answered is “Who is going to publish semantic descriptions of social media data on the Web?”

Given that leaders like Digg and MySpace have plans to support the Semantic Web, I’m optimistic that the unanswered question will be answered soon.

Previously there was no way of linking this data, but the semantic web is able to retrieve and collate it. This means that it can now input your personal information should you join another social network.

MySpace users will still maintain complete control over what information they share and who gets to see it, but it will make sharing information across different platforms easier and quicker.

Yahoo announced earlier this year its plans to utilise the semantic web with a more efficient tagging system to give better search results.

MySpace’s DeWolfe said he hoped other networking sites, including Facebook, would sign up to the agreement.

I’ve just been to XTech 2008 in Dublin, a great conference covering web development, open source, Web 2.0 and open standards.

One of the main themes that emerged was that the semantic web is already here if you know where to look - it’s appearing in parallel with the existing web, with RDFa and microformats like hCard and XFN embedded in pages. Ontologies like SIOC and FOAF are enabling semantically-rich data to be moved from one system to another, and standards like OpenId and OAuth are making it possible to provide secure access to data across api boundaries.

There are new tools that help visualise and navigate the parallel web that increasingly exists alongside older document-based data, like the Tabulator plugin for Firefox that displays RDF hidden in pages, and Google’s Social Graph api that make it easier to navigate linked data programmatically.

In terms of existing content sites, data can be immediately made more open by redesigning the site to have consistent uris and embedded RDFa (London Gazette), or in a more dynamic site like the Guardian Online, pages can be constructed automatically to pull in disparate sources of data (sports results, 3rd party content) and then referenced as persistent uris.

Data can increasingly be mixed and enriched - one interesting project used socially authored content to augment content on the BBC archive site (Yahoo for term extraction, Wikipedia for providing further information on those related topics, and then DBpedia for disambiguation - by examining each of several potential matching pages for one that contains additional terms from the original page, to confirm the context).

Other types of site are appearing like FireEagle, which are not really “sites” in the conventional sense. FireEagle is a location broker - somewhere that you can maintain and update a record of your location (determined by mobile mast locations, by wifi access point, or by setting it programmatically), which can then be used by any number of location-based services. OAuth underpins this, as a mechanism for allowing apis to be given permissions to query each other. One interesting point was that OAuth may lead to difficulties with building a strictly RESTful site - for example, a site may want uris that represent the location of a specific user, which would typically include the users’ id as part of the uri. However, using OAuth means that there may only be a token that represents the user for a given session, rather than a user name, so forming uris based on that token may not be appropriate.

One of the most exciting demonstrations of how new applications can be built from reworking data with semantic techniques was Andrew Walkingshaw’s session on Golem and CrystalEye, in which he showed how you can apply an ontology to existing data, then mine that data for relationships and re-visualise it as geographical distributions or an academic social graph.

Overall, a very impressive conference, with plenty of food for thought, and plenty of examples of how the semantic web is here around us already.

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