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."