10 Semantic Web Apps to Watch

"One of the highlights of October's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of 'Semantic Apps' as a force. Note that we're not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those technologies, but not necessarily. This was a point made by the founder of one of the Semantic Apps listed below, Danny Hillis of Freebase (who is as much a tech legend as Berners-Lee).

The purpose of this post is to highlight 10 Semantic Apps. We're not touting this as a 'Top 10', because there is no way to rank these apps at this point - many are still non-public apps, e.g. in private beta. It reflects the nascent status of this sector, even though people like Hillis and Spivack have been working on their apps for years now."

TopBraid Composer

"TopBraid Composer™ is an enterprise-class platform for developing Semantic Web ontologies and building semantic applications. Fully compliant with W3C standards, Composer offers comprehensive support for developing, managing and testing configurations of knowledge models and their instance knowledge bases. Composer provides a flexible and extensible framework with a published API for developing semantic client/server or browser-based solutions, that can integrate disparate applications and data sources."

OntoBlog: Linking Ontology and Blogs

Semantic blogging attempts to enhance traditional blogging by using Semantic Web technologies. Blog entries are semantically enriched by metadata. However, authoring metadata is not easy for normal users. Currently semantic blogging only offers limited semantic capabilities. It is still difficult to navigate through semantically related entries, search and organize relevant blog entries. OntoBlog attempts to solve these issues by linking blogs to existing ontology maintained using available ontology management environment. OntoBlog is a prototype semantic blogging system which employs semi-automatic semantic annotation of blog entries using ontology instances. Blog entries are automatically mapped to related instances using language processing techniques. The rich structure of ontology with different semantic relations, enhanced by inference, can enable useful semantic capabilities. Semantic navigation allows users to navigate through each blog entry to semantically related blog entries. Semantic search can be employed in blogs. Semantic aggregation collects blog entries relevant to the topic of interest and organizes them meaningfully. A prototype for computer department domain ontology has been implemented.

Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group Case Studies and Use Cases

"Case studies include descriptions of systems that have been deployed within an organization, and are now being used within a production environment. Use cases include examples where an organization has built a prototype system, but it is not currently being used by business functions."

PURL work with Zepheira [OCLC]

"OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and Zepheira, LLC announced today that they will work together to rearchitect OCLC's Persistent URL (PURL) service to more effectively support the management of a 'Web of data.' The software developed will be released under an Open Source Software license allowing PURLs and the PURL infrastructure to be used in various applications for public or proprietary use. OCLC and Zepheira are collaborating to extend the open and inclusive community of PURL users."

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

CCQ vol. 43, no. 3/4: "Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic serves as a pattern for understanding the paradigm shifts represented by the Semantic Web. Foucault presents the history of medical practice as a 3-stage sequence of transitions: from classificatory techniques to clinical strategies, and then to anatomico-pathological strategies. In this paper, the author removes these three stages both from their medical context and from Foucault’s historical sequence, to produce a model for understanding information organization in the context of the Semantic Web. We can extract from Foucault’s theory a triadic relationship between three interpretive strategies, all of them defined by their different relationships to a textual body: classification, description and analysis."

Ontologies in OWL for Rapid Enterprise Integration

Ontologies in OWL for Rapid Enterprise Integration
"Ontologies enable explicit expression of collective concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and exposed on a network offer the potential for unprecedented interoperability solutions since they are semantically rich, computer interpretable and inherently extensible. In this paper, we describe how we applied ontologies in OWL for rapid enterprise integration of heterogeneous data sources. We found that once a robust foundational domain ontology is established, it is easy and quick to integrate new data sources and therefore rapidly provide new system capabilities."

Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web

Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web: "Though the term 'microformats' may not yet be mainstream, mainstream vendors have taken notice. Big names like Technorati, Mozilla, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Digg, and Yahoo among countless others are all at work trying to make microformats work. By some estimates there are already hundreds of millions of microformatted pieces of information online."

How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part One (Product Value Management)

How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part One (Product Value Management): "Recently, much has been done in conceptualizing various advanced constructs to enable at least targeted subsets of the product definition reconciliation scope prescribed by the '12-Fold Way' framework. Shared representations have been developed for generic physical architectures reconciling 3D part designs with configurable engineering BOM-s. Also, generic feature architectures have been deployed to reconcile definable sales configurations with pick to order and assemble to order manufacturing BOM-s. While these advances solve particular product definition reconciliation problems, they can be implemented in a variety of information management architectural approaches. Two conceptual approaches come to mind: meta-schema mappings and ontologies."

How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part Two (Product Value Management)

How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part Two (Product Value Management): "In the previous blog (How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part One), I tried to outline (by a very broad brush stroke) two basic approaches to managing shared product definition representations. I compared them based on some rudimentary criteria to conclude that ontology based approach offers more benefits in a complex product manufacturing environment. We are naturally more familiar with the meta-schema mapping approach, because it is conceptually just an extension of more mature documented database management techniques. Relational databases have been around for over fifty years, still maturing at a significant rate in areas of interoperability, information aggregation and data exchange. However, robust technical solutions based on ontologies are relatively new, although conceptually drawing on many years of advanced research in areas of semantic webs and taxonomy of complex systems. In this part, I will review basic technical aspects of managing product definition with an ontology based solution. In the next part (Part Three), I will discuss various guidelines and recommendations for successful planning and implementation of such a solution."

How Practical are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part Three (Product Value Management)

How Practical are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part Three (Product Value Management): "If you decide to pursue an ontology based solution to your product definition management, governance of such a solution becomes critical for two basic reasons:

1. Ontology is managed by a community of architects in a federated manner. These architects will need to know how to get benefits from the ontology for their own data reconciliation needs and how to use the ontology to maintain semantic convergence as strong as possible.

2. Integrity of data reconciled by the ontology depends on policies that are flexible in design, yet strictly administered for all registered users and data exchange protocols. That way, run time execution of various read and write calls between systems and users follows best possible choices between all authors and consumers of information."

SemanticReport.com - About Us

SemanticReport.com - About Us: "SemanticReport is published by Semantic Universe, a subsidiary of Wilshire Conferences and the Semantic Technology Conference, the leading educational conference on the commercial application of semantic technologies. The SemanticReport newsletter and web site bring you the same high quality editorial content you are accustomed to receiving through our educational conferences.

SemanticReport is produced with the cooperation and contributions of numerous industry participants, including technical experts, consulting organizations, product vendors, customer organizations, academicians and researchers. If you would like to contribute to the content or improvement of the publication, please feel free to contact Scott Koegler, the publisher at scott@semanticreport.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it "

How Semantic Technology Fits Into the Enterprise

How Semantic Technology Fits Into the Enterprise: "Semantic web is a very promising technology that has suffered a lack of pragmatic focus. It was born in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the aftermath of HTML's success, and with XML starting on an impressive trajectory. But it was positioned either as a form of search engine enhancement -- which struggled for relevance against the Google approach of building gigantic indexes -- or as an artificial intelligence system working on the scale of the Web, which set a large barrier to credibility. One area where semantic web technology could show more ready promise is as a component of enterprise data architecture, but there has been precious little discussion and work in this area."

Entity Describer for Connotea, 09/07/07

Connotea: Community Pages: EntityDescriber: "E.D. is a mechanism for intersecting the Semantic Web with the normal Web. It lets Connotea users (though we may extend it to other systems such as Del.icio.us) annotate (tag) resources on the Web with terms from existing controlled vocabularies such as MeSH, the Gene Ontology, the Atom ontology, and the Person ontology. For more thoughts on and progress with ED, see blog posts about ED.

You might enjoy using ED if any of the following apply to you:

• You would like to organize your tags more effectively
• You are using Connotea to create a reference system - for example for a class
• You are a member of a group of people that would like to use a common set of tags - possibly with the aim of creating a nice reference library.
• You like the idea that every time you tag something you are contributing to the semantic web
• You would like to utilize queries over your collection and others that take advantage of the structure of ontologies. For example, queries for 'brain', that return resources tagged with 'hippocampus', 'cortex', 'cerebellum', etc..
• You would like to help an aging graduate student add one more chapter to his thesis... "

SD Times - ITerating Weaves a Semantic Web

SD Times - ITerating Weaves a Semantic Web: "There are more than 100,000 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net, and SourceForge is not a world onto itself: Web sites describe, link to and review software hosted in its repository. In that vein, how can information about those projects be kept accurate and up to date?

Dedicated individuals could spend countless hours carefully categorizing software and paging through change logs, describing software their own way for their own organization; islands of information about software can already be found across the Web.

ITerating, a startup that hosts a wiki-based software guide, thinks it has a better solution born out of so-called “Semantic Web” technologies. On Aug. 27, ITerating launched a free Semantic Web service that shares data about software with other Web sites, using standardized vocabularies."

ECS EPrints Service - Knowledge Enhanced Searching on the Web

ECS EPrints Service - Knowledge Enhanced Searching on the Web: "The move towards a Semantic Web has been in progress for many years and more recently there have been applications that make use of semantic web technology. One of the features that made the Web so easy to use is the ability to search web pages in a matter of seconds through the use of search engines. Now that the use of OWL and RDF as a knowledge representation format is increasing, the possibility appears to improve the quality of searching by using the semantic web to enhance the ‘ordinary’ Web. This paper outlines an ar-chitecture for using distributed knowledge bases to assist and improve search-ing on the web."

Using Wikipedia as a Web Database

Using Wikipedia as a Web Database: "The DBpedia.org project approaches both problems by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by making this information available on the Semantic Web. DBpedia.org allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to DBpedia data."

An Ontology and a Software Framework for Competency Modeling and

An Ontology and a Software Framework for Competency Modeling and Management

"The importance given to competency management is well justified. Acquiring new competencies is the central goal of any education or knowledge management process. Thus, it must be embedded in any software framework as an instructional engineering tool, to inform the runtime environment of the knowledge that is processed by actors, and their situation toward achieving competency-acquisition objectives. We present here some of our results in the last 10 years that have led to an ontology for designing competency-based learning and knowledge management applications. Based on this ontology, we present a software framework for ontology-driven e-learning systems."

Battle for the Future of the Net

Battle for the Future of the Net: "European engineers, working with researchers from the U.S. and elsewhere, already have played a big role in the development of basic Web 3.0 standards. Now, governments are raising the stakes to keep Europe at the forefront. 'They want to create the defining technologies for the Semantic Web and give European companies an advantage in the market,' says Mark Greaves, a scientist with the asset management firm Vulcan."

Digital Web Magazine - RDF For The Rest Of Us

Digital Web Magazine - RDF For The Rest Of Us: "RDF is different. It’s not a format; it’s a framework for describing data. What RDF does is to take a step back; instead of giving you a fixed set of terms to label your data with (such as HTML’s elements or a microformat’s class names), RDF provides you with a framework in which you can mix-and-match terms from existing vocabularies—or invent your own—in whatever combination best suits your particular content."

OwlSight

OwlSight: "OwlSight is an OWL ontology browser that runs in any modern web browser; it's developed with Google Web Toolkit. OwlSight is the client component and uses Pellet as its OWL reasoner."

Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web

Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web: "This document gives an overview on the state-of-the-art of multimedia metadata formats. Initially, practical relevant vocabularies for developers of Semantic Web applications are listed according to their modality scope. In the second part of this document, the focus is set on the integration of the multimedia vocabularies into the Semantic Web, that is to say, formal representations of the vocabularies are discussed."

Semantic Search | Search Engine of the Day

Search Engine of the Day: "SWSE is a search engine for RDF on the Web, and provides the equivalent services a search engine currently provides for the HTML Web. The system explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an interface through which users can find the information they are looking for. Because of the inherent semantics of RDF and other Semantic Web languages, the search and information retrieval capabilities of SWSE are potentially much more powerful than those of current search engines."

The Semantic Web Goes to Work

The Semantic Web Goes to Work: "You better figure out what the Semantic Web is and soon, because its concepts have graduated from academia and are starting to contribute to your competitor's bottom line."

PURL work with Zepheira [OCLC]

PURL work with Zepheira [OCLC]: "The new PURL software will also be updated to reflect the current understanding of Web architecture as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This new software will provide the ability to permanently identify networked information resources, such as Web documents, as well as non-networked resources such as people, organizations, concepts and scientific data. This capability will represent an important step forward in the adoption of a machine-processable 'Web of data' enabled by the Semantic Web."

Radar Networks

"Radar Networks is pioneering the next phase of the Web, sometimes referred to as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or what we call it, "the Intelligent Web." Using our platform, we are developing a new Web-based online service that will bring the power of the Intelligent Web to consumers, slated for Beta in 2007.

The company was founded in 2003, by Web visionary Nova Spivack who co-founded EarthWeb (IPO: 1998), and has attracted an all-star team of industry veterans. In 2006 the Company completed its first outside venture round with investors including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures as well as leading angels. We are headquartered in San Francisco."

GRDDL Primer

"GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. It is a technique for obtaining RDF data from XML documents and in particular XHTML pages. Authors may explicitly associate documents with transformation algorithms, typically represented in XSLT, using a link element in the head of the document. Alternatively, the information needed to obtain the transformation may be held in an associated metadata profile document or namespace document. Clients reading the document can follow links across the Web using techniques described in the GRDDL specification to discover the appropriate transformations. This document uses a number of examples from the GRDDL Use Cases document to illustrate, in detail, the techniques GRDDL provides for associating documents with appropriate instructions for extracting any embedded data."

GRDDL Use Cases: Scenarios of extracting RDF data from XML documents

"There are many dialects of XML in use by documents on the web. There are dialects of XHTML, XML and RDF that are used to represent everything from poetry to prose, purchase orders to invoices, spreadsheets to databases, schemas to scripts, and linked lists to ontologies. Some are formally defined and others allow for more freedom of interpretation. Recently, two progressive encoding techniques, RDFa and microformats, have emerged to overlay additional semantics onto valid XHTML documents. These techniques offer simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

While this breadth of expression is quite liberating, inspiring new dialects to codify both common and customized meanings, it can prove to be a barrier to understanding across different domains or fields. How, for example, does software discover the author of a poem, a spreadsheet, or an ontology? And how can software determine whether any two of these authors in fact refer to the same person?

Any number of the XML documents on the web may contain data whose value would increase dramatically if they were accessible to systems which might not directly support such a wide variety of dialects but which do support RDF."

The Tech Lab: Bradley Horowitz

"Bradley Horowitz, responsible for novel technology development at search giant Yahoo, looks ahead to the 'internet of things'.

Imagine this scenario: I am in a supermarket and I pick up a can of tomatoes and I place it in the shopping trolley. Immediately my mobile phone flashes green to indicate to me that it is a good buy. I go down the aisle and choose a bottle of wine but this time my phone flashes red to suggest I reconsider.

This is only possible when we have a universal resolver for every entity in the world." Read more . . .

Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation

"Abstract. There is an assumption commonly embraced by ontological engineers, an assumption which has its roots in the discipline of knowledge representation, to the effect that it is concepts which form the subject-matter of ontology. The term 'concept' is hereby rarely precisely defined, and the intended role of concepts within ontology is itself subject to a variety of conflicting (and sometimes intrinsically incoherent) interpretations. It seems, however, to be widely accepted that concepts are in some sense the products of human cognition.

The present essay is devoted to the application of ontology in support of research in the natural sciences. It defends the thesis that ontologies developed for such purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter, not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws. We outline the benefits of a view along these lines by showing how it yields rigorous formal definitions of the foundational relations used in many influential ontologies, illustrating our results by reference to examples drawn from the domain of the life sciences."

A novel ontology-based biomedical search engine

"When people search, they have questions in mind. GoPubMed allows to significantly faster find information needed through the use of background knowledge. GoPubMed:

• retrieves PubMed abstracts for your search query,
• detects terms from the Gene Ontology (GO) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the abstracts,
• displays the subset of the GO and MeSH relevant to the keywords, and
• allows you to browse the ontologies and display only papers containing specific GO and MeSH terms."

Microformats: Everyperson's Semantic Web, 06/15/07

"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging). . . . [microformats are] a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general."

Check out the microformats blog. This article published in Smashing Magazine is full of interesting resources regarding microformats.

Elsevier’s Inteleos Poised to Launch Integrating Technology for Drug Tracking and Analysis

Elsevier’s Inteleos Poised to Launch Integrating Technology for Drug Tracking and Analysis

"With the Inteleos UI, pharmaceutical and biotech professionals will be able to compare and contrast information from multiple data sources – both internal and external to their organization – streamlining the data collection, analysis and decision making process. The single, intuitive interface presents information from disparate sources in a comprehensive, integrated format that is quick and easy to use.

The Inteleos UI is the first product to offer the ability to conduct single searches across multiple databases. An expanded ontology of scientific terms gives users the ability to conduct an exhaustive search. Advanced functionality includes the ability to "drill down" to the desired level of detail and automatic alerts when there are changes in the data sources."

SAP unveils Co-Innovation Lab and envisions Web 3.0

SAP unveils Co-Innovation Lab and envisions Web 3.0

"During his remarks, Kagermann discussed his notion of Web 3.0. "Web 2.0 is coming up in value. We want to take Web 2.0 to 3.0." It’s a version of the semantic Web theme, but focused on business software. "If you look to the services that we are defining with our enterprise SOA and things a bit beyond, we know that these type of enterprise services over time, in collaboration with many customers, associations and partners, a kind of standard can bring the Internet of business services," Kagermann said. "We don’t have the semantics today that go beyond Web 2.0 and will allow software to to speak to each other."

Using the Semantic Web in the Real World

Using the Semantic Web in the Real World

"Here is a visual list of some good examples of public technology deployments that use Semantic Web technology. In the first few slides I do a head-to-head comparison of a search using traditional Web search technology and a query using Semantic Web technology.

Semantic Web Technology Gains Steam

Semantic Web Technology Gains Steam

"For those companies looking for commercial Semantic Web products, the market is finally beginning to gain steam as more vendors from the traditional web and web service development, search, data analysis and management fields are releasing products dedicated to creating and managing applications and data for the Semantic Web.

eWEEK Labs took a look at three products designed to help businesses build and manage Semantic Web solutions; Altova's SemanticWorks 2007, Intellidimension's RDF Gateway 2.3.4 and TopQuadrant's TopBraid Composer 2.0. All three of these programs are available in free evaluation versions and are worth checking out for any business interested in building Semantic Web solutions."

Ontology and the Semantic Web

"Ontology and the Semantic Web
Zhang, Jane (2007) Ontology and the Semantic Web. In Tennis, Joseph T., Eds. Proceedings North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization 2007 1, pages pp. 9-20, Toronto, Ontario.

Full text available as:PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.
Abstract

This paper discusses the development of a new information representation system embodied in ontology and the Semantic Web. The new system differs from other representation systems in that it is based on a more sophisticated semantic representation of information, aims to go well beyond the document level, and designed to be understood and processed by machine. A common theme underlying these three features, i.e., turning documents into meaningful interchangeable data, reflects a rising use expectation nurtured by modern technology and, at the same time, presents a unique challenge for its enabling technologies."

Haiku: An Introduction to the Semantic Web

An Introduction to the hard Semantic Web......in simple Haiku.

The Challenges of the Semantic Web

"The Challenges of the Semantic Web
Click here to download the podcast or Click here to listen to it using the integrated eWEEK podcast player.
In this Tech Rising podcast, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza speaks to Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web and head of the World Wide Web Consortium, about the current status of the Semantic Web, the challenges it faces and its future. Jim also speaks to Eric Miller, president of Zepheira, a company that helps businesses deploy and leverage Semantic Web technologies, and to Stephen Downes, a researcher at the National Research Council's Institute for Information Technology in Canada, who believes that the Semantic Web will ultimately fail because of proprietary data protections."

Semantic Web Case Studies and Use Cases Published

"Semantic Web Case Studies and Use Cases Published
The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group is pleased to announce the first set of Case Studies and Use Cases giving some examples of how the Semantic Web of machine readable data is used today. Applications are presented in areas ranging from automotive to health care, and from B2B systems to geographical information systems. The SWEO Interest Group will continue to publish new Case Studies and Use Cases in the future; an RSS feed for new submissions is available. A short overview is also available in Open Document Format, PDF, and HTML formats."

Dow Jones Introduces Synaptica 6.4 for Improved Business Semantic Management

"Dow Jones Introduces Synaptica 6.4 for Improved Business Semantic Management
— its latest semantic Web-enabled knowledge organization system for the enterprise. Synaptica 6.4 simplifies and standardizes vocabulary and metadata management in order to unlock valuable business intelligence."

W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions

W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions is an excellent resource for overview answers to the following questions:

• What is the Semantic Web?
• How does the Semantic Web relate to…
• How do I participate in the Semantic Web?
• Questions on RDF, Ontologies, SPARQL, Rules . . . .

Oracle claims the lead in semantic web

Oracle claims the lead in semantic web
By Eric Lai, Computerworld
"Oracle has staked its claim to leadership in the enterprise side of the emerging semantic web space, saying that more than 100 commercial and open source applications are using its version of the technology." Read article. . . .

Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs

Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs: Tom Gruber thinks that "ontologies are a technology to make a minimal commitment while being as clear as possible. The minimalism comes by abstracting away from implementation details, which are biased by needs of efficiency and convenience. The clarity comes from careful specification, with at least some of the specification document couched in a formal language that forces one to be explicit about assumptions and the meanings of terms."

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report)

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report: "This report presents a brief description of the different activities carried out in the field of ontology engineering. It identifies a lack of guidelines on how to address modeling issues during the ontology conceptualization phase, in the current methodologies to build ontologies from scratch. It describes an example scenario of an ontology modeling task and it proposes a possible solution inspired by folksonomy based systems and faceted classification. This is followed by a study of the difficulties found to adapt the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard to model an ontology fit for purpose in a specific university curricula domain. It also gives an example of a prototype for a potential next generation semantic web application and a brief summary of the main viewpoints that will characterize such applications. Finally it outlines possible paths of further research to address ontology modeling issues and it suggests looking at various sources for possible solutions (schemes of folksonomy and faceted classification, design principles of object-oriented and relational database applications, and ontology evaluation).