OMB Policy on Posting Information Sparks Debate

OMB policy on posting information sparks debate: "The Office of Management and Budget’s new policy asking agencies to improve how they disseminate public information is at the heart of a larger battle over how much categorization is needed to make government information publicly accessible.

The new policy, required by the E-Government Act of 2002, is another piece in an ongoing disagreement over whether search technology is good enough to find specific instances of government information or whether metadata tagging and other categorization techniques are necessary at some level.

In a memo issued late last week, Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management, detailed three steps—for the most part involving publishing materials online—agencies must complete by Sept. 1 to meet the requirements outlined in Section 207 of the E-Government Act of 2002."

The future of Online Search

CNN.com - The future of online search - Dec 23, 2005: "LONDON, England (CNN) -- If anyone can guess what is in store for Web searching, it is Wired magazine co-founder John Batelle, who has spent most of his career as a technology journalist trying to find the answer.

CNN: What is the next big thing on the Web?

JB: The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. I might say, 'This is a picture of a seaside with a sunset,' but someone else comes and says, 'No this is a picture of a beach in Thailand,' and another person comes along and says, 'This is a picture of a place I like to go diving.' And over time, this one object, and every object in the world gets thusly tagged, gets enough intelligence around it that it can be found no matter how you might ask for it, the brittleness problem is solved."

Campmor Jumpstarts Business Performance with IBM and Tachyon Solutions

Campmor Jumpstarts Business Performance with IBM and Tachyon Solutions: "IBM business partner Taychon Solutions worked with Campmor to implement an e-commerce solution powered by IBM WebSphere Commerce and IBM DB2 Universal Database. The innovative search capabilities of the solution make it possible to index specific products in the database and allows customers to search both keyword and concept. The solution also includes apparel ontology with synonyms and acronyms for various terms a customer might enter, as well as likely misspellings that are automatically corrected. Campmor customers can now perform detailed searches and find exactly what they are looking for in sub-second response times. As a result the number of orders placed from searches has increased 10 percent and the average size of a search order has increased 15 percent within a year."

Semantic Web, Here We Come

RED HERRING | Semantic Web, Here We Come: "A consortium of young companies declared their support this week for building categories into web sites that would make them more easily searched and combined.

The "Structured Blogging Initiative" is an attempt to jump-start the "semantic web," the idea of giving deeper meaning to the Internet advocated by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. By incorporating descriptive information into the code of web pages, laypeople will be able to designate their content as a movie review, an event posting, or an item available for sale."

Grid Semantics for Virtual Collaboration

IST Results - Understanding Grid semantics for virtual collaboration: "An EU project hopes to realise the ultimate potential of Grid computing by creating a network that is intelligently aware of its components and of the domain it addresses, enabling quick and easy virtual collaboration.

If successful, the InteliGrid project will deliver on the long promised but never realised potential of networks, which people and companies can plug into, use its resources, and find and share information based on its meaning.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In semantic computing computers can deal with meaningful objects. It is a huge topic in Web computing right now. Dr Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founding fathers of the Web, is currently devoting the majority of his creative energies into making The Semantic Web a reality.

If he succeeds it will have a profound impact on society, perhaps more than the creation of the Internet itself. Information will no longer be tied simply to words that appear on the page. InteliGrid is making bold steps in semantic computing for VOs in complex industries. Its concern is not so much words but models of engineering products.

The Protege Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System 3.2 Beta

The Protege Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System: "Protege is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework. Protege is based on Java, is extensible, and provides a foundation for customized knowledge-based applications. Protege supports Frames, XML Schema, RDF(S) and OWL. It provides a plug-and-play environment that makes it a flexible base for rapid prototyping and application development."

Tim Bray, Co-author of the XML Specification

No easy road to interoperability: "After he helped develop the Extensible Markup Language, Tim Bray could have rested on his laurels, collecting the occasional consulting check. Instead he continued to innovate.

From 1996 to 1998, Bray co-wrote version 1 of the XML specification, which subsequently made its way into countless Web applications and other networking software. Today he is the director of Web technologies for Sun Microsystems Inc. He also co-chairs the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Working Group, an Internet Engineering Task Force body that is laboring to standardize a data feed format for Web pages, based on XML. "

SPARQL: Querying the Semantic Web

XML.com: Introducing SPARQL: Querying the Semantic Web: "This tutorial, the first of a three-part series, introduces SPARQL -- a query language and data access protocol for the Semantic Web. SPARQL is defined in terms of the W3C's RDF data model and will work for any data source that can be mapped into RDF. The specification is under development by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) and has recently reached Last Call Working Draft.

At this point in its life cycle the specification is stable enough that developers can begin seriously exploring its capabilities. And the availability of several SPARQL query engines means that this exploration can be practical rather than theoretical."

Altova's Semantic Web Development Tool

Altova's Semantic Web Development Tool: "Altova, creator of XMLSpy and other leading XML, data management, UML, and Web services tools, announced a new addition to its award-winning line of XML applications. Altova SemanticWorks 2006 is a visual Semantic Web development tool with support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) creation and editing. In line with its tradition of supplying developers with easy-to-use, visual development tools, Altova created SemanticWorks to help customers learn and work with emerging Semantic Web technologies in an intuitive way. "

First Medical Group on Semantic Web

Medical industry first group on semantic Web: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has launched its first special interest group to begin the planning necessary for application of semantic Web technologies in a vertical industry.

The new group, called the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG), will be the first to deploy semantic Web specifications into services defined by a user community.

Until now, semantic Web specifications have been largely generalized in nature, making it difficult to see their full potential.

W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says that 'this new venture puts W3C specification through the paces of a dynamic, multifaceted and interdependent set of communities.'"

First Neurology Repository for the Semantic Web

Teranode Corporation - Teranode Press Releases: "December 12, 2005 - Teranode Corporation, the leading innovator of experiment design automation (XDA) software for the Life Sciences industry, today announced it will collaborate with Science Commons, a project of the non-profit corporation Creative Commons, to build and implement the industry's first neurology repository for the Semantic Web. The project, dubbed NeuroCommons.org (www.neurocommons.org), will be a freely accessible neurology commons of data, tools, and pathway knowledge to be used by public and private researchers. Science Commons will use Teranode's award-winning platform, TERANODE XDA, as the infrastructure for NeuroCommons.org. All content will be available in Resource Description Framework (RDF), allowing participating foundations to search and access a shared repository of data and research, currently restricted by different formats and copyright restrictions. "

New Brain Trust to Work Like the Web

New Brain Trust to Work Like the Web: "'All the Web can do is find a document for you and display it for you,' said Wilbanks. 'The semantic web marks things up in a more concrete manner; it says that there are relationships.' For example, a scientist could search for peer-reviewed articles about a particular gene, data related to that gene, or models about how that gene might affect other genes and proteins.

Neurocommons.org is set up to be maintained by its community of users. Researchers will be able to annotate each others' data.

Wilbanks hopes that, eventually, researchers will see contributing information to the semantic Web as part of their scientific duty, much like peer review. But he admits that it isn't yet part of scientific culture. 'It's hard to get someone to take the time to say, 'I'm going to make my data reusable by someone that doesn't know me.' '"

Masters of the Semantic Web

Masters of the Semantic Web :: Bio-IT World: "'The advent of the Semantic Web is providing the life sciences community with the standards and tools needed to build integrative informatics systems,' says John Reynders, information officer, discovery & development informatics, at Eli Lilly. 'We are very interested in the [Semantic Web standards] and view them as essential tools in cracking the heterogeneous data integration challenge facing our drug-hunters here at Lilly.'"

Northrop Grumman Acquires Proprietary Software from Tucana Technologies

Northrop Grumman Acquires Proprietary Software from Tucana Technologies: "Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) announced that it has purchased the rights to proprietary software developed by Tucana Technologies, a software-products company specializing in using semantic technologies to integrate enterprise information. Northrop Grumman will market these technologies to government and commercial users seeking more efficient methods of sharing business data.

Tucana's software was created for advanced applications that use 'metadata,' or data which describes other information, to integrate information from different sources. This technology is based upon standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to form the basis of the 'Semantic Web,' which is the evolving next-generation of the Web. The Semantic Web is being developed through use of common protocol languages so that machines can find, sort and classify information more efficiently.

With the explosive expansion of the digital-data domain, the defense, intelligence, healthcare and financial industries are looking at semantic applications and technologies with great promise for addressing the challenge of "knowledge discovery." Tucana's technologies will enable a new generation of software applications that will allow for the organization and mining of vast amounts of data and deliver the ability to rapidly derive knowledge from previously uncorrelated events. The user communities will move from information processing to knowledge discovery."

NewsForge | Explore the Semantic Web using Piggy Bank

Explore the Semantic Web using Piggy Bank: "If you've ever wondered what all the excitement surrounding the Resource Description Framework (RDF) or the Semantic Web is about, then I have good news. You can explore both without leaving your Web browser, using Piggy Bank.

Piggy Bank is a Java-powered Firefox extension developed by MIT's SIMILE project, a group that is working on a suite of Semantic Web applications and tools. Piggy Bank runs in the background while you browse the Web in your normal fashion. However, when you hit upon a page with an RDF link, a small 'data coin' icon appears in the Firefox status bar. Click on it and Piggy Bank will import and parse the accompanying RDF data. You can search through it via Piggy Bank's built-in browser interface, or save it for later use."

XML.com: Introducing SKOS

XML.com: Introducing SKOS: "SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), recently introduced by the W3C, is a model for expressing knowledge organization systems in a machine-understandable way, within the framework of the Semantic Web. The SKOS Core Vocabulary is an RDF (Resource Description Framework) application. Using RDF allows data to be linked and merged with other RDF data by Semantic Web applications. SKOS Core provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes, including thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries, and other types of controlled vocabulary. This article will provide some examples for using SKOS and discuss the general principles of building such knowledge bases."

What is the Semantic Web about, Tim Berners-Lee?

Consortiuminfo.org Consortium Standards Bulletin- June 2005: "The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is to create a universal medium for the exchange of data where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. The Semantic Web is designed to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. We are talking about data here, not human documents.

The Semantic Web is not about the meaning of English documents. It's not about marking up existing HTML documents to let a computer understand what they say. It's not about the artificial intelligence areas of machine learning or natural language understanding -- they use the word semantics with a different meaning.

It is about the data which currently is in relational databases, XML documents, spreadsheets, and proprietary format data files, and all of which would be useful to have access to as one huge database."

Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web: "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries [Semantic Web Activity]. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [RDF], which provides a simple data formalism for talking about things, their properties, inter-relationships, and categories (classes). For an overview of RDF, see [RDF Concepts]

This document describes in brief how to express the content and structure of a thesaurus, and metadata about a thesaurus, in RDF. Using RDF allows your data to be linked to and/or merged with other RDF data by semantic web applications. In practice, this means that data sources can be distributed across the web in a decentralised way, but still be meaningfully composed and integrated by applications, often in novel and unanticipated ways."

Gavilian Research Announces 2005 Metadata Solutions Report

CRM Today: Gavilian Research Announces 2005 Metadata Solutions Report: "Gavilan Research Associates, a provider of metadata management research and vendor/product comparisons, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an important metadata research study called the 2005 MetaData Solutions Report(tm).

This unique, innovative product survey was conducted in early 2005 and was targeted at enterprise software vendors who market themselves as 'metadata management solutions'. The Survey also targeted software companies who offer metadata products in the data warehousing, business intelligence, knowledge management, enterprise architecture or taxonomy/ontology markets. Each software vendor was sent the same comprehensive list of over 100 questions, which comprise all of the typical features, functions, and issues that Global 5000 companies face when organizing a metadata management environment."

Software AG Delivers Further Building Block for Service-oriented Architecture

Software AG delivers further building block for service-oriented architecture: "[Johannesburg, 24 March 2005] - Software AG has announced the worldwide release of its Enterprise Information Integrator (EII) version 2.1, an important building block in implementing a service-oriented architecture.

EII V2.1 is the first globally available information integration product to use Semantic Web technology. By dynamically combining the meaning and context of business data with the rules that govern its use, Enterprise Information Integrator provides business leaders with the resources to make faster decisions based on real-time information availability."

RNA Project to Create Language for Scientists Worldwide

RNA project to create language for scientists worldwide: "Creating the RNA Ontology will require incorporating the methods and vocabularies of chemists, molecular biologists, genomicists, information scientists and structural biologists. To help sort out the difficult conceptual issues, the consortium will organize frequent face-to-face meetings of RNA scientists. Members will also report their progress at the annual RNA Society meetings and receive feedback from the wider community of researchers.

The ontology team will identify all RNA motifs, or repeated patterns, mentioned in the literature or appearing in databases, to agree upon and write a definition for each motif. The consortium's work will be accessible on the Web to the various RNA research communities using servers hosted at BGSU. "

Web Service API and the Semantic Web

Web Service API and the Semantic Web @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL: "As the Semantic Web gains momentum, it's important for Web service developers to keep abreast of its technologies and prepare for a change in their industry.

This article looks at how the Semantic Web applies to Web services, including what specifications are under development and how you might prepare for integration with future semantic applications.

What Is the Semantic Web and How Does It Impact Web Services?
The current World Wide Web presents large volumes of information in a format tailored for viewing by people. A person can surf from link to link, query search engines, or attempt to reach sites by domain name. While the pages retrieved are appealing to humans, to the software that processes the contents they are no more than a string of random characters.

Software programs cannot load a random document, Web page, or file and understand the contents of that document. While the software could make assumptions based on HTML or XML tags, a human programmer would have to get involved and determine the meaning, or semantics, of each tag. From a computer's perspective, the World Wide Web is a garbled mess. Luckily, there's a solution: the Semantic Web."

Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government

XML.com: Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government: "Taxonomies have long played a central role in both medical and library science for the classification of medical terms and books. Recently, the U.S. federal government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Data Reference Model (DRM). The FEA DRM specifies three abstract layers of an organization's information: business context, information exchange, and data element description. Business context specifies the use of a taxonomy to categorize government information. One definition of a taxonomy is 'a scheme that partitions a body of knowledge and defines the relationships among the pieces. It is used for classifying and understanding the body of knowledge.'"