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."

PURL work with Zepheira [OCLC]

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

GRDDL Primer

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

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

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

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

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

W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions

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

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

The semantic web is upon us, says Berners-Lee

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."

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

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."

Image Annotation on the Semantic Web

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."