The Semantic Weblog

10 Semantic Web Apps to Watch

2007-12-09T07:50:00.001-05:00

"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

2007-11-17T04:58:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-11-10T07:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-06T06:54:00.000-04:00

"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]

2007-10-06T06:50:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-09-29T10:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-25T06:39:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-22T04:38:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-09-19T05:26:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-09-19T05:25:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-09-19T05:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-15T11:35:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-15T11:33:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-07T20:17:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-29T13:33:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-29T13:26:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-10T04:18:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-10T04:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-09T06:38:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-07T06:04:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-07T06:01:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-07T05:51:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-04T07:26:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-04T07:24:00.000-04:00

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]

2007-07-25T10:39:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-06T09:48:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-30T06:11:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-30T06:07:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-30T05:02:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-27T04:21:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-26T05:22:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-15T12:33:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-08T09:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-08T09:49:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-08T09:43:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-08T09:41:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-07T08:56:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-06T09:31:00.000-04:00

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

The Challenges of the Semantic Web

2007-06-06T09:29:00.001-04:00

"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

2007-06-06T09:28:00.001-04:00

"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

2007-06-06T09:25:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-06-02T06:03:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-28T10:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-03T05:58:00.000-05:00

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)

2007-03-03T05:49:00.000-05:00

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).

Ontologies

2006-09-30T09:04:00.000-04:00

Ontologies: "Imagine that you have a beaker capable of holding 10cc of a liquid and you pour 5cc of water into it. Some people would say that the beaker is half-full ... others would say that it is half-empty ... and some would say that it is filled to one-half of its capacity or that it merely contains 5cc of water.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that we can portray the same item in various ways, with each representing a different perspective or mindset. Thus, when selections are made from the set of possible portraits and are then gathered together in the conceptual framework known as an ontology, the result is but one of several possible vistas."

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink

2006-09-30T08:43:00.000-04:00

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink: "This paper presents an overview on the role of agents in the Semantic Web, that was the topic of the AgentLink Technical Forum Group on "Semantic Web Agents", aimed at fostering closer collaboration between the European communities working in these areas. The paper is structured in three main sections. In the first one, we argue how agents are an essential component of the Semantic Web, then we provide a brief history, by no means comprehensive, of how the Semantic Web vision -- that includes agents -- has evolved in the past fifteen years. We then conclude reporting on the topics presented and discussed during the Technical Forum."

IST Results - EU research driving the web services seismic shift

2006-08-26T08:13:00.000-04:00

IST Results - EU research driving the web services seismic shift: "The growth of web services marks a seismic shift in computing. Web services, composed of a multitude of simple software applications, have the potential to crack the monolithic software application model and create a new online-services landscape, accessible to all. New research reveals that Europe is closely involved in setting the key standards for this development.

Web services provide a standard means of interlinking two or more discrete software applications, each of which could be hosted on quite different platforms and/or frameworks. Thanks to such interoperability, web services can be combined to carry out quite complex operations. Software programs offering simple services can interact with each other and in the process deliver sophisticated added-value services."

The semantic web is upon us, says Berners-Lee

2006-05-26T09:13:00.000-04:00

The semantic web is upon us, says Berners-Lee - WebWatch: "The semantic web, where machines are able to read the contents of documents as readily as people can, now has all the standards and technologies it needs to succeed, according to W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Speaking at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday, he said it was now time for web developers and content producers to start using semantic languages in addition to HTML."

The Semantic Web Revisited

2006-05-24T03:32:00.000-04:00

ECS EPrints Service - The Semantic Web Revisited: "The original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols. This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI."

Content-based Ontology Ranking

2006-05-18T03:45:00.000-04:00

ECS EPrints Service - Content-based Ontology Ranking: "Techniques to rank ontologies are crucial to aid and encourage the re-use of publicly available ontologies. This paper presents a system that obtains a list of ontologies from a search engine that contain the terms provided by a knowledge engineer and ranks them. The ranking of these ontologies will be done according to how many of the concept labels in those ontologies match a set of terms extracted from a corpus of documents related to the domain of knowledge identified by the knowledge engineer's original search terms."

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View

2006-04-25T06:34:00.000-04:00

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View: "Seamark Navigator is location- and format-independent. "No longer are enterprise users forced to make decisions based on algorithmic results lurking behind a text box; now, users can make these decisions with confidence, knowing they have considered all the relevant content and relationships they may not have known existed."

The Seamark navigation engine uses "facets" (properties, categories, features) to guide users to relevant content. The Seamark Navigator provided faceted navigation in its earlier versions, but Petrossian noted that the key distinguishing piece of the new version is the new dynamic capabilities. Seamark Navigator 4.0 stitches metadata together on-the-fly, using RDF (resource description framework), a Semantic Web specification from the W3C (http://www.w3.org/RDF). It's flexible and doesn't require data models to be fixed, he explained. Because of this, the product can illustrate unseen relationships. Products from competitors also can bridge information silos but require "considerable coding in advance and lots of heavy-lifting proprietary technology," according to Petrossian. Seamark Navigator is also a bidirectional system, in that it allows users to contribute tags."

Vikings Set Out to Conquer Semantic Web

2006-04-13T05:13:00.000-04:00

Vikings set out to conquer Semantic Web: "German scientists are working on a project they call Wikinger (German for 'Viking') based on the concept of Wikipedia to provide virtual knowledge networking in addition to the classic exchange of knowledge at Congresses. The goal of the project is to create a domain-neutral platform for scientists to allow them to perform research in knowledge bases regardless of where they are and to generate new knowledge via the Internet in collaboration. The researchers are paying special attention to support for colleagues in networking new contributions with current knowledge. To this end, techniques from the Semantic Web are being used."

Image Annotation on the Semantic Web

2006-03-31T05:53:00.000-05:00

Image Annotation on the Semantic Web: "Many applications that involve multimedia content make use of some form of metadata that describe this content. The goals of this document are (i) to explain what the advantages are of using Semantic Web languages and technologies for the creation, storage, manipulation, interchange and processing of image metadata, and (ii) to provide guidelines for doing so. The document gives a number of use cases that illustrate ways to exploit Semantic Web technologies for image annotation, an overview of RDF and OWL vocabularies developed for this task and an overview of relevant tools."

Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web

2006-03-30T11:57:00.000-05:00

Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web: "The number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving, and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies based on certain ontology-structure analysis."

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

2006-03-09T04:52:00.000-05:00

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies: "The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags."

Caboodle Launches Open Source Semantic Web-Based Search Engine

2006-03-04T13:54:00.000-05:00

LinuxElectrons - Caboodle Networks Launches Open Source Semantic Web-Based Search Engine: "BURLINGAME, Calif.: Caboodle Networks has launched an open source search engine based upon semantic web standards. This new search engine, Kit, (available for free at http://semantical.org) is ideal for finding digital content and services otherwise poorly suited to discovery by traditional text-retrieval search engines the company claims. Kit can intelligently recommend related digital content such as games, music, images, and video, thereby truly leveraging the value hidden in the “long tail” of published content. Now companies and individuals hosting Internet gaming and music sites, as well as companies such as wireless carriers with mobile portals, have access to the very best standards-based solution for locating and recommending their downloadable content and services."

IST Project Wide

2006-02-17T06:40:00.000-05:00

Project Wide: "WIDE aims to provide a basis for improving the quality and efficiency of innovative product design. The objectives are to investigate and demonstrate the application of emerging Semantic Web (SW) technologies and methods in an integrated, scalable and reconfigurable design information support management and knowledge sharing system. The key to improving innovative design lies in better information management and knowledge sharing support of the inter-working of multi-disciplinary design teams. The machine-understandable semantics of information sources, offered by the SW, driven by a general design process ontology (based upon an existing Knowledge Level theory of designing), together with meta data based filtering and presentation techniques, thus form the key components of the information support management and knowledge sharing system to be developed in the project."

Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance

2006-02-10T06:05:00.000-05:00

ECS EPrints Service - Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance: "Named Graphs is a simple, compatible extension to the RDF abstract syntax that enables statements to be made about RDF graphs. This approach is in contrast to earlier attempts such as RDF reification, or knowledge-base specific extensions including quads and contexts. In this paper we demonstrate the use of Named Graphs and our experiences developing new kinds of semantic web application that build on Named Graphs for digital signatures, provenance, and semantic reasoning. We present a working example based on the Named Graphs for Jena (NG4J) API, from which we developed a semantic version control system for Software Engineering capable of reasoning about Named Graph-based provenance. We go on to discuss the implications of Named Graphs for Description Logics and semantic inference strategies."

Smart RSS Readers at Attensa

2006-02-02T04:06:00.000-05:00

Smart RSS Readers at Attensa: "The Attensa RSS network is based on unique, proven intellectual property in a scaleable RSS architecture that efficiently organizes, distributes and measures RSS news feed articles and their associated attention metadata. Using Attensa network attention streams that accommodate the Attention.xml standard, metadata is unobtrusively fingerprinted and triangulated through collaborative filtering to deliver the most relevant information. By sharing, aggregating and triangulating the attention streams (anonymously and in near real-time) generated by the millions of people using RSS feeds, new possibilities emerge to provide individuals with higher value content. This metadata can be used to rank the popularity of articles by measuring the audience size and appetite for news from specific bloggers and news sources. It can also be used to create privacy protected anonymous user profiles, based on permission, that can recommend content, refine blog and Website searching and enhance the experience of tracking the news that matters to millions of people."

Mind the Gap: Another Look at the Problem of the Semantic Gap in Image Retrieval

2006-02-02T03:56:00.000-05:00

ECS EPrints Service - Mind the Gap: Another look at the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval: "This paper attempts to review and characterise the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval and the attempts being made to bridge it. In particular, we draw from our own experience in user queries, automatic annotation and ontological techniques. The first section of the paper describes a characterisation of the semantic gap as a hierarchy between the raw media and full semantic understanding of the media's content. The second section discusses real users' queries with respect to the semantic gap. The final sections of the paper describe our own experience in attempting to bridge the semantic gap. In particular we discuss our work on auto-annotation and semantic-space models of image retrieval in order to bridge the gap from the bottom up, and the use of ontologies, which capture more semantics than keyword object labels alone, as a technique for bridging the gap from the top down."

Ontology Construction from Online Ontologies

2006-02-01T05:27:00.000-05:00

ECS EPrints Service - Ontology Construction from Online Ontologies: "One of the main hurdles towards a wide endorsement of ontologies is the high cost of constructing them. Reuse of existing ontologies offers a much cheaper alternative than building new ones from scratch, yet tools to support such reuse are still in their infancy. However, more ontologies are becoming available on the web, and online libraries for storing and indexing ontologies are increasing in number and demand. Search engines have also started to appear, to facilitate search and retrieval of online ontologies. This paper presents a fresh view on constructing ontologies automatically, by identifying, ranking, and merging fragments of online ontologies."

Enter the Semantic Grid

2006-02-01T05:06:00.000-05:00

IST Results - Enter the Semantic Grid: "The upshot is a technological infrastructure in which semantically-aware middleware allows collections of resources - computing, storage, data sets, digital libraries, scientific instruments, businesses and people – to rapidly come together to form virtual organisations to solve a specific problem and disband just as easily once a solution is found. By overcoming cross-organisational, cross-industry and cross-country boundaries, and increasing interoperability by making semantic assumptions explicit, the Semantic Grid promises to aid organisations and businesses in any field where input from multiple and potentially highly differentiated actors is required."

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL

2006-01-28T05:42:00.000-05:00

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL: SiberLogic, based in Toronto, has some very interesting products that seem to be putting it all together. "SiberLogic today offers a complete and cost-effective environment for teams producing technical documents. A flexible family of products provides not only fundamentals such as version and workflow control, conditional and multi-channel publishing, and staging & deployment options, but also leading-edge functionality that includes semantic enablement via emerging standards such as OWL and RDF, full DITA and S1000D support, real-time fragment reuse analysis, and dynamic generation of a cross-platform knowledge base."

SMEs Get Better Targeted Web Searches

2006-01-28T05:36:00.000-05:00

IST Results - SMEs get better targeted Web searches: "'The problem with existing search engines, especially for SMEs seeking an exact response to a query, is that they find many hundreds of sites that may be of little use,' says Sonia Bergamaschi of the University of Modena in Italy and coordinator of the IST project SEWASIE that developed the engine. 'Our idea was to develop a set of ontologies related to specific industry sectors, in order to limit the search to sites that are really useful.'"

Rescentris Releases Version 2.5 of its Semantic Notebook, CERF - The ELN for Biology

2006-01-26T06:08:00.000-05:00

Rescentris Releases Version 2.5 of its Semantic Notebook, CERF - The ELN for Biology: "Rescentris, Ltd., a leading provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) software for biology and multi-disciplinary life sciences, today announced the immediate availability of CERF 2.5 and the CERF Development Kit (CERF-DK) to help life sciences organizations better manage their research information. CERF (Collaborative Electronic Research Framework(TM)) is the industry's only ELN built on semantic web technologies. The semantic engine in CERF enables it to capture the meaning and relationships in R&D information as well as the experimental context in which data are collected - all transparently, while the scientists do their work."

A Semantic Solution to Finding Information among Peers

2006-01-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

IST Results - A semantic solution to finding information among peers: "Peer-to-peer systems have advantages over centralised server-reliant networks, but finding information among multiple distributed databases can prove difficult. European researchers solved the problem by adding Semantic Web technology to P2P networks."

The Shape of i-Technology to Come @ SYS-CON AUSTRALIA

2006-01-22T04:01:00.000-05:00

LinuxWorld Viewpoints: The Shape of i-Technology to Come: According to Danny Ayers: "The rebranding of the Semantic Web as 'Semantic Technologies' and 'Web of Data' will enable previously dismissive pundits to hype it as the Next Big Thing. There will be real growth in these areas, but not as yet meteoric. Yahoo! will reveal its answer to Google Base, built using Semantic Web technologies. Nokia will join VoIP to the Semantic Web."
. . . .
Support for RSS in Microsoft Vista and Internet Explorer 7 will be indistinguishable from Windows 95’s Active Channels following the company’s removal of new features due to security concerns. There will be massive growth in enterprise-oriented knowledge management systems based on RSS and Atom. There will be a new generation of RSS/Atom aggregators exploiting data published using XHTML microformats and Structured Blogging."

National Center for Biomedical Ontology

2006-01-12T07:05:00.000-05:00

National Center for Biomedical Ontology: "The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The Center's resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this biomedical information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects (DBPs) to enable their research and to stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center is undertaking outreach and educational activities to train the future generation of researchers in using biomedical ontologies and the Center's tools to enhance scientific discovery."

IST Results - Semantic Web Travel Services on a Voyage of Discovery

2006-01-07T07:55:00.000-05:00

"Opening up travel Web services
The industry is making moves to improve the situation, and has formed a consortium called the Open Travel Alliance (OTA). The OTA is producing XML message specification schemas to be exchanged between the trading partners, including availability checking, booking, rental, reservation, query services, insurance. This will improve matters, but not every travel company's applications can be expected to produce and consume OTA-compliant messages.

The SATINE project developed a secure peer-to-peer network that enables peers to deploy their semantically-enriched travel Web services and allows others to discover these services semantically. 'The concept, 'semantic web services', is very important for the tourism industry since the industry is structured as a distributed environment, because of its nature, and tourism companies need to reach the services in this distributed environment,' says Dr Dogac. 'By introducing semantics to Web services, we have addressed the interoperability issue on the semantic level and constructed a peer-to-peer network that eases service discovery.'

The project also developed mechanisms to enrich ebXML (e-business XML) registries through OWL-S ontologies to describe the Web service semantics. OWL itself is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the Web. Ontologies are the vocabularies that allow machines to identify specific services or information. For example, a human operator would understand the term 'booking', but it needs to be defined in a special way for a machine to understand. "

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee Starts Blogging . . . .

2006-01-03T05:34:00.000-05:00

The Father of the Web Joins the Blogosphere: "On December 12, 2005, accordingly, the first-ever blog entry by Sir Tim Berners-Lee went online. And within days no fewer than 455 comments accumulated."

OMB Policy on Posting Information Sparks Debate

2005-12-24T11:28:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-23T06:33:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-17T04:57:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-16T05:58:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-15T07:08:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:47:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:43:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:27:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-10T05:52:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-22T06:17:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-04T21:13:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-25T07:38:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-22T11:09:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-17T06:31:00.000-04:00

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

2005-04-20T14:40:00.000-04:00

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

2005-03-28T14:36:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-25T14:31:00.000-05:00

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

2005-02-14T14:26:00.000-05:00

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

2005-01-14T14:21:00.000-05:00

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.'"

XML.com: Uncle Sam's Semantic Web

2004-09-17T06:20:00.000-04:00

XML.com: Uncle Sam's Semantic Web: "From the EPA to the Navy, the United States government is coming to see the Semantic Web as a solution to huge data-processing problems. XML.com columnist Paul Ford gets the scoop at the 2004 Semantic Technologies for e-Government Conference.

What did the Semantic Web have to do with the war in Iraq? Not enough, says Jim Hendler, who heads the Mindswap Semantic Web research laboratory at the University of Maryland, speaking at the 2004 Semantic Technologies for e-Government Conference in McLean, Virg., held Sept. 8-9, 2004. 'The beginning of the Iraqi operation was postponed for weeks because information systems couldn't be made interoperable in the time required,' said Hendler. 'Systems couldn't talk to one another.' It was a problem, he says, that a Semantic Web framework could have solved.

Operation Infinite Triples

Hendler's assessment -- that the Semantic Web is the essential glue that will allow large systems to speak to one another, across organizational boundaries -- was shared by many in attendance. A number of agencies and corporations described Semantic Web projects in progress, for client organizations like the Navy, NIST, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Child Support Enforcement, the Office of Homeland Security, and others."

XML.com: Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited

2004-07-15T17:05:00.000-04:00

XML.com: Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited: "Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology (IT) is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself.

Opening the International Semantic Web Conference in 2003, the conference chair Jim Hendler declared that 'a little semantics goes a long way.' The belief being that infusing even a little semantic quality into our data (residing in web pages, database tables, electronic documents, or whatever) can mean that data is more immediately, broadly, and profoundly usable by all applications aware of the knowledge-representation scheme -- the ontology.

For such reasons, there is a growing sense among researchers and practitioners that ontologies will play an important role in forthcoming information-management solutions. Several conditions predicate this current state of affairs."

RDF Semantics

2004-02-20T17:01:00.000-05:00

RDF Semantics: "RDF is an assertional language intended to be used to express propositions using precise formal vocabularies, particularly those specified using RDFS [RDF-VOCABULARY], for access and use over the World Wide Web, and is intended to provide a basic foundation for more advanced assertional languages with a similar purpose. The overall design goals emphasise generality and precision in expressing propositions about any topic, rather than conformity to any particular processing model: see the RDF Concepts document [RDF-CONCEPTS] for more discussion.

Exactly what is considered to be the 'meaning' of an assertion in RDF or RDFS in some broad sense may depend on many factors, including social conventions, comments in natural language or links to other content-bearing documents. Much of this meaning will be inaccessible to machine processing and is mentioned here only to emphasize that the formal semantics described in this document is not intended to provide a full analysis of 'meaning' in this broad sense; that would be a large research topic. The semantics given here restricts itself to a formal notion of meaning which could be characterized as the part that is common to all other accounts of meaning, and can be captured in mechanical inference rules.

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RDF Primer

2004-02-19T16:58:00.000-05:00

RDF Primer: "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, copyright and licensing information about a Web document, or the availability schedule for some shared resource. However, by generalizing the concept of a 'Web resource', RDF can also be used to represent information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they cannot be directly retrieved on the Web. Examples include information about items available from on-line shopping facilities (e.g., information about specifications, prices, and availability), or the description of a Web user's preferences for information delivery.

RDF is intended for situations in which this information needs to be processed by applications, rather than being only displayed to people. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. The ability to exchange information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created."

OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements

2004-02-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements: "The Semantic Web is a vision for the future of the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information available on the Web. The Semantic Web will build on XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes [XML] and RDF's flexible approach to representing data [RDF Concepts]. The next element required for the Semantic Web is a web ontology language which can formally describe the semantics of classes and properties used in web documents. In order for machines to perform useful reasoning tasks on these documents, the language must go beyond the basic semantics of RDF Schema [RDF Vocabulary].

This document is one part of the specification of OWL, the Web Ontology Language. The Document Roadmap section of the OWL Overview document describes each of the other documents. This document enumerates the requirements of a web ontology language as perceived by the working group. However, it is expected that future languages will extend OWL, adding, among other things, greater logical capabilities and the ability to establish trust on the Semantic Web."

We motivate the need for a web ontology language by describing six use cases. Some of these use cases are based on efforts currently underway in industry and academia, others demonstrate more long-term possibilities. The use cases are followed by design goals that describe high-level objectives and guidelines for the development of the language. These design goals will be considered when evaluating proposed features. The section on Requirements presents a set of features that should be in the language and gives motivations for those features. The Objectives section describes a list of features that might be useful for many use cases but may not necessarily be addressed by the working group.

OWL Web Ontology Language Test Cases

2004-02-17T14:32:00.000-05:00

OWL Web Ontology Language Test Cases: "As part of the definition of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) the Web Ontology Working Group provides a set of test cases. This document presents those test cases. They are intended to provide examples for, and clarification of, the normative definition of OWL found in [OWL Semantics and Abstract Syntax] to which this document is subsidiary.

This document is one component of the description of OWL, the Web Ontology Language, being produced by the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. The Document Roadmap section of the [OWL Overview] describes each of the different parts and how they fit together.

This document describes the various types of test used and the format in which the tests are presented. Alternative formats of the test collection are provided. These are intended to be suitable for use by OWL developers in test harnesses, possibly as part of a test driven development process, such as Extreme Programming [XP]. The format of the Manifest files used as part of these alternative formats is described."