Semantic FocusSemantic FocusSemantic Focus is a blog and community that centers around the topic of the Semantic Web and anything to do with it. This community was created to focus the effort of reaching the Semantic Web as well as serve as the best reference for anyone who wan 
Articles
Semantic Data Storage in Oracle
2009-01-16 03:26:00 Oracle 10g Release 2 / Oracle 11g offers a robust, scalable, secure platform to store RDF and OWL data. It allows efficient storage, loading and querying of semantic data. Queries are enhanced by adding relationships (ontologies) to data and evaluated on the basis of semantics. Data storage is in the form of RDF triples (Subject, Predicate, Object) and can scale up to millions of triples. The triples stored in the semantic data store are modeled as a graphed structure. All the data is stored in a single central schema allowing access to users for loading and querying data. The Subject and Object are modeled as nodes, while the predicates are denoted by links in the graphed structure. Nodes are stored and efficiently reused when required. An RDF triple in the semantic store has a subject (start node), predicate (relationship), object (end node), which comprises a link. A new link is created on inserting a new triple and nodes are reused if similar nodes already exists. New object... More About: Storage , Oracle
Calling All RDF Dumps
2008-12-18 20:34:00 Today on the Linking Open Data mailing list, Kingsley Idehen of OpenLink Software announced that he is preparing to load the entire LOD cloud into Virtuoso 6.0 Cluster Edition. The datasets are being added to a table on the ESW wiki, making it convenient for anyone doing Semantic Web research to get a hold of the datasets. Once all the datasets are added we should have a better idea of how much linked data there really is out there. This may also raise the bar for other triple stores and force them to develop methods for storing several billion triples. Here are his instructions for adding your dataset to the table: Go to: http://esw.w3.org/topic/DataSetRDFDumps Add your data set to the table (if it isn't already listed) or correct erroneous entries Add a URL entry to the "Archive URL" column Add a Publisher URI to the "Publisher / Maintainer" column (used for the construction of Attribution Triples) If you don't have a URI for yourself, you can get one by registeri... More About: Calling
Service Ontologies
2008-12-15 02:32:00 Ontologies classifying and describing services are called service ontologies. The currently used WSDL interface describes a service by specifying the operation name, inputs required for the service invocation, output of the service and its target address for invocation. Human intervention is required in this loop since the current architecture only addresses the syntactical aspects of Web services and lacks choreography mechanisms. Service ontologies supplements the WSDL interface, since additional knowledge is required to enable automation discovery, invocation and composition of services. The idea is to annotate web services, enabling the automation of the web service life cycle. The existing conceptual models for describing services are OWL-S, WSMO, WSDL-S, SWSF, SAWSDL. Web services can be modeled in different tools like OWL-S Editor, OWL-S IDE, Protege, IRS-III, METEOR-S. For example, the OWL-S service ontology is classified into three categories: profile, model, gro...
Semantic Web Service Life Cycle and Service Modeling
2008-12-15 00:14:00 Semantic Web services follow a life cycle, right from deployment to its invocation. The life cycle of Semantic Web services comprises different stages like service modeling, service discovery, service definition and service delivery. The life cycle begins with modeling the web service and the service request by the provider and the consumer respectively. Web service descriptions are developed using models like OWL-S, WSMO. Service descriptions are used in the discovery stage on which discovery algorithms, matchmaking techniques are applied. Once a set of service providers are identified for a service requester, service definition takes place to select the concrete service. Finally, the concrete service is delivered to the service requester in the delivery phase. Web service modeling is a critical aspect of the web service life cycle. It requires loads of human effort for annotating web services. Services can be modeled using two approaches viz. Code driven approach, model drive... More About: Life , Cycle , Modeling
Can Graphd Scale to Meet Semantic Web Demands?
2008-12-09 22:45:00 Freebase stores millions of entities and assertions about nearly every topic one can ponder (thanks are owed to their seed dataset – Wikipedia – and their amazing community). The amount of information that Freebase stores is incredible, and is a testament to what can be accomplished with the help of a dedicated community and a little (or a lot) of clever software engineering. Graphd is the in-house tuple store powering Freebase's backend. Written in C, Graphd runs on Unix-based machines (presumably some Linux distro) and processes commands in a simple, template-based query language called MQL. The query language looks strikingly similar to JSON and Python dictionary syntax, so developers familiar with either should find working with their API a sinch. On performance, Freebase's Scott Meyer stated as of April 9th, 2008 that Graphd is able to demonstrate sustained throughput of about 200,000 simple queries per minute on a single AMD64 core (querying a graph of only 1... More About: Demands , Meet , Scale
The Map of Data: Over 10 Billion Pieces of Reusable Information
2008-11-19 18:58:00 I just stumbled upon a useful resource from Sindice (the Semantic Web search engine) called the Map of Data . The Map of Data lists sites that export their information via Microformats and embedded RDF (as well which format(s) the sites are using). Each site has been categorized and conveniently placed into lists. The categories include books, people, places, products and listings, social news, events, politics, and more. According to Sindice over 10 billion pieces of reusable information can already be found across 100 million pages.Got something to say? Leave a comment! More About: Information , Pieces
Algorithms vs. Data: The Seesaw Effect
2008-10-31 03:16:00 Over the years I've noticed that the importance of algorithms and data tends to shift back and forth, depending on which at the time is hardest to duplicate (often from a business perspective). This effect seems to be caused by the availability or demand of one side increasing or decreasing, shifting the balance of importance to the other. At one point the world of software was dominated by the proprietary. The organization with the best software (backend, algorithms, etc) was the dominant entity and data (from say, a Web 2.0 perspective) was generally not the focus. This may have partly been the responsibility of a mindset formed during an era with very little storage space and before mass user activity on the Web. Things have changed and the word proprietary has become a sort-of developer faux pas. Open source has caused a paradigm shift away from the old proprietary software models and has allowed organizations to focus their attention on the other side of the equation: data.... More About: Data , Effect , Algorithms
Cross-Pollinating DBpedia and Freebase
2008-10-30 06:51:00 Now that Freebase is available as Linked Data a big question that comes to mind is whether these two major projects will move to assimilate one another. DBpedia and Freebase – two endeavors primarily focused on curating unstructured and semi-structured data about everything and releasing it back into the wild (with structure) – get the bulk of their information from Wikipedia, so the amount of topical overlap is assumed to be extremely high. DBpedia gains new information when it extracts data from the latest Wikipedia dump, whereas Freebase, in addition to Wikipedia extractions, gains new information through its userbase of editors. It is this incredible amount of overlap (with regard to content and purpose) which creates a sort of paradox, where it can be speculated that DBpedia and Freebase would both gain and lose value through efforts to cross-pollinate. Assimilating each other's updates would cause both to become "more complete" (in the same sense that an increm... More About: Cross
Freebase Officially Linked Data with Release of RDF Service
2008-10-29 13:46:00 At ISWC2008 Freebase released its new RDF service for generating RDF representations of Freebase topics, allowing Freebase to be used as Linked Data ! To obtain the RDF data for a topic send a GET request to http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/some.topic.id where "some.topic.id" is replaced by the desired topic identifier (slashes in the identifier must be replaced by dots). Topic data can be represented as N3, RDF/XML or Turtle depending on the preferences expressed in your client's HTTP Accept header. Try it out with the Freebase topic Semantic Web. You can also cater to clients that prefer HTML output by using the /ns end-point (http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/some.topic.id ). The service performs the content negotiation automatically; delivering human-friendly HTML representations to Web browsers, and redirecting clients expecting RDF to the /rdf URL (via 302 redirect). One downside is the data doesn't appear to link to external resources, in a sense walling itself in. It should be trivi... More About: Service , Release
Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls for the Semantic Web
2008-05-23 00:36:00 ReadWriteWeb just posted an interesting article about investor opportunities and pitfalls in the Semantic Web space. The questions were asked to a panel of industry insiders at the SemTech 2008 conference. Panelists include Amanda Reed (Palomar Ventures), Eghosa Omoigui (Intel), and Stephen Hall (Vulcan Capital). This information can be very useful if you're looking to start a business within the Semantic Web industry.Got something to say? Leave a comment! More About: Investor , Opportunities
Semantic Web Search Engine Roundup
2008-02-27 11:18:00 Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. Below is a list of Semantic Web search engines that are currently under development. Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) SWSE is a search engine for the RDF Web 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 easy-to-use 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. SWSE indexes RDF data from many sources, including OWL, RDF and RSS files. RSS2 is converted to RDF and they will be adding GRDDL sources soon. Developed by DERI Irel... More About: Roundup , Search Engine
The Calais Initiative Looks Back on Its First Month
2008-02-27 02:15:00 The Calais Initiative is almost one month old, and they've already received a large and welcoming response from the development community (1,113 early adopters)! When they weren't busy doing interviews or answering hundreds of emails and forum posts, they were coming up with ways to help spread the technology. They will soon be releasing a Wordpress plugin, followed by plugins for Drupal, Plone and other content management systems. They also express that Calais is not only good for named entity extraction, but can extract other facts from documents. An example they give is "what technologies are associated with what company in a document?" Good luck, Calais team!Got something to say? Leave a comment! More About: Back , Month
True Knowledge: The Natural Language Question Answering Wikipedia for Facts
2008-02-26 23:05:00 True Knowledge is a natural language search engine and question answering site, but to leave it at that would not do the site justice. What makes it stand out from similar sounding services like Powerset and Freebase? True Knowledge tackles natural language search and question answering (much like Powerset and Hakia), and it also maintains a knowledge base of facts about the world (similar to DBpedia and Freebase). However, what makes True Knowledge stand out is that they've combined these features and encourage their userbase to contribute facts and add new knowledge. A brief overview of True Knowledge True Knowledge has combined their technologies to create something that doesn't easily fall into any one category. In fact, you can categorize it as all of the following: Question -Answering site You can ask questions about any subject and get a direct response. Unlike human-powered Q&A sites, you don't need to wait for someone to respond. The computer answers you... More About: Facts , Natural , Wikipedia , Language
302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts!
2008-02-21 18:02:00 A lot of you emailed me asking where to find more videos, so I'm delivering the goods. I've expanded the previous list from a paltry 17 to a remarkable 302, and I've included podcasts this time! There were so many videos I had to break them up into different categories for easier skimming. There are no duplicates, however I did place some videos into more than one category when I felt it was appropriate. This list is monstrous, enjoy. Introductions (videos) Semantic Web - A Concise Introduction (Rudi Studer) - 23:33 Intro to the Semantic Web - 6:06 The Semantic Web - 6:49 Introduction and Overview to the Semantic Web / ISWC07 (James A. Hendler) - 44:39 Introduction to the Semantic Web - 33:44 An Introduction to OWL / ISWC07 (Sean Bechhofer) - 43:04 An Introduction to the Semantic Web / ISWC07 (Fabio Ciravegna) - 2:40:34 RDF (videos) RDF - Connecting Software and People - 30:27 RDFa Basics - 9:29 A Relaxed Approach to RDF Querying / ISWC06 (Peter Wood) - ... More About: Videos , Podcasts
Semantic Focus Community Update (18-Feb-2008)
2008-02-18 22:07:00 I've been hard at work on updating Semantic Focus , both from an articles standpoint as well as adding new features. Although larger, more hush-hush projects (Semantic Web/NLP related) loom on the horizon, I'd like to share with you a few changes you may have noticed around the blog, and how they are especially of benefit to our guest writers and other members of the Blogosphere. Authors by activity (post count) Authors of Semantic Focus articles are now being displayed on every blog page in the right sidebar under the heading "Authors by activity (post count)." The authors are arranged by the number of articles he or she has published. This is both for the benefit of the good people that have taken time to deliver fresh content to the Semantic Focus audience, as well as foster new guest authors to come forward and submit their material. The true benefit for authors is the site-wide non-nofollow link to the author's homepage. This gives them exposure, traffic, and Goo... More About: Community , Update , 2008
SPARQL Endpoint Interface to Python (SPARQL Wrapper for Python)
2008-02-18 20:33:00 To all my fellow Python enthusiasts, Ivan Herman (with the help of new programmers from the CTIC Foundation in Spain) has released a new version of his SPARQL wrapper for Python. The wrapper creates the query URI for you and will convert the results to RDF/XML and JSON, if possible. Keep up the excellent work guys, we can never have enough Semantic Web libs for Python!Got something to say? Leave a comment! More About: Interface , Wrapper
17 Semantic Web, RDF, and OWL Videos
2008-02-18 11:56:00 I've compiled a list of videos about the Semantic Web , RDF, and OWL for your viewing pleasure! Most of these videos are short, ranging from about 6 to 10 minutes while others are long (45+ minutes). Included are a few introductions, a few interviews, and a few that get into the gritty details. The Semantic Web & Social Software 4:13, In this short interview, Dr John Breslin, subcluster leader of the Social Software group at DERI, Galway gives his view on what the Semantic Web is. He introduces what DERI is about and discusses the projects he is working on, in particular the SIOC project and explains what Social Software is. Intro to the Semantic Web 6:06, A short introduction to the semantic web. This video uses simple, yet entertaining drawings to get its points across. RDFa Basics 9:29, This is the follow-up to the video above and covers the basics of RDFa. Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web 8:23, Tim Berners Lee talks about the Semantic Web, ... More About: Videos
Revisiting: Does the World Need a Metadata Extraction Service?
2008-02-18 10:38:00 11 months ago I posted a short entry that posed the question of whether the world needed a metadata extraction service. I stated that the service could quickly become the largest repository of metadata (in the form of named entites and facts) on the Web if it stored the resulting metadata from each request. Open Calais seems to me to be the "metadata extraction service" I had in mind; it's is a Web service that allows you to automatically annotate content and extract information like facts and named entities (people, places, and organizations, and much more) from unstructured text. If that weren't enough of a good thing, Open Calais returns the metadata in RDF. Although the question of whether we need it still hasn't been answered, I believe this service could be a catalyst for change towards Semantic Web standards if it is integrated into (or used to create plugins for) the multitudes of open source blogs and other CMS software. Open Calais opens the door to the possibility o... More About: World , Service , The World , Metadata
The Fault-Tolerant Semantic Web
2008-02-15 21:53:00 The Web as we know it today is an ecosystem of people, documents, machines, and an exponentially increasing amount of unstructured information. Everyone is free to change the landscape of the Web, and millions of us (people, that is) have taken our crack at it, shaping it how we see fit. This generally entails creating our own Web sites, but anyone contributing in any way is actively changing the way the Web is structured. Changes to the Web's structure will only become more obvious and pervasive as we approach the full-scale vision of the Semantic Web . The Web has survived (perhaps even thrived) because of the simple fact that it is the most fault-tolerant public information system on the planet. We can remove a Web site - a node in the global Web graph - but its removal is unlikely to affect the overall structure of the Web in such a way as to cause damage to its usefulness or availability. In the Semantic Web, making a small change to a single RDF document can have cascad... More About: Fault
Is Reuters Unleashing the Semantic Web?
2008-02-15 05:00:00 Open Calais - a new and smart API from Reuters - finally does what critics say to be the greatest obstacle to the Semantic Web : Taking the metadata burden from the end-user by providing an automatic meta-tagging tool. The principle behind Open Calais is easy: Put in some unstructured text and get in return nicely structured RDF-data. Backed by powerful Text Mining and machine learning techniques the API automatically detects entities like persons, events, countries and other facts. Open Calais takes account of the fact that the added value of content is hidden in its structure. Uncovering that structure and representing it in a interoperable format makes existing resources more programmable and reusable. But what is in for Reuters? Nothing less than the biggest structured content repository on the web. Should not we talk about this little fact as well?Got something to say? Leave a comment!
Natural Language Search - A New Breakthrough?
2008-02-13 10:10:00 While I am still waiting for an invitation from Twine (probably you too?) I have received one from Powerset - natural language search. Powerset obviously is a promising company (and is promising a lot), so I was excited when I was starting to play around with this new tool which still isn't available for the public. The very first impression was good. The interface is well done and there are a couple of new ideas how Wikipedia (and similar knowledge bases) can be navigated in the future. But unfortunately after a while it was clear, that search results must be improved. However Powerset might be implemented, the only benchmark which counts at the end is, which improvement the new application (semantic web or not) delivers compared to existing ones. Some examples: - The question: "who is the president of the united states?" delivers some similar questions or related articles of Wikipedia but NOT the right answer. In comparison: ask.com delivers this perfect result. - My ... More About: Natural , Search , Language
The Object Oriented Web - Part 3 - Social Networks
2008-02-13 02:53:00 Once again, the main idea behind the social network comes from a reversal process. We're dealing with an approach focused on the people (user-centric) and not on the applications allowing us to produce various data (text with blogs, pictures on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc.). Rather than indicate to our contacts the numerous RSS feeds representing our "digital life", we are going to point at a unique address (our OpenID) whereby they will have access to any shared data. Even better, they will be able to add us in their contact list in order to automatically receive our new data (our "lifestreams"). To draw a parallel between an existing tool, adding an RSS feed to an aggregator like Google Reader comes down to adding a contact in our social network. But there is a major difference because this new approach simplifies things a lot while introducing many new fascinating possibilities. Just take a look at Facebook or at any "lifestreaming" tool if you need to be convinced. We... More About: Social , Social Networks , Networks , Part , Object
Introduction to Semantic Web Vision and Technologies - Part 5 - Building OW
2008-02-11 13:15:00 We're still using Protege, but this time working with the new ALPHA version and getting deeper into concepts. Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion! More About: Building , Technologies , Introduction , Part , Vision
Early Preview of RDF Enabled Tagging in KDE4 (Screencast)
2007-12-18 23:03:00 semantic weltbild 2.0 wrote a short article about NEPOMUK-KDE, a project whose aim is to bring RDF's resource annotation to the KDE desktop environment. NEPOMUK-KDE is a sub-project of the Semantic-Desktop project Nepomuk which aims to provide a full implementation of the standards and APIs defined in Nepomuk on the KDE desktop. As a sub-project of Nepomuk the two main issues are the maintenance and intensive usage of metadata throughout the desktop and powerful peer-to-peer collaboration techiques. This is accomplished in part by ditching the simplistic, string-based tagging model in favor of using RDF. If only this was for GNOME. Check it out!Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion! More About: Preview , Screencast , Early , Tagging
The Object Oriented Web - Part 2 - Datahubs
2007-11-16 19:07:00 To begin with, there is a very simple idea: Websites should themselves indicate their changes to the search engines. I've already touched upon the subject in the previous part of this series, right now search engines have a reversed approach which consists of crawling the Web constantly looking for the slightest modification. Don't you think it's silly? Think about the number of Web pages to visit, imagine the cost to get the lowest frequency between each visit. Consequently, it seems difficult to consider the development of new search engines today. Nevertheless, the advent of the Semantic Web should lead to their multiplication, in a vertical way, while search engines are getting specialized more and more in specific fields. Crawling seems to be the "boring" part for the search engines and if they want to be distinguishable from each other it won't be with crawling. The innovation should be in the indexing, ranking, etc. But can we consider that some day search engines like... More About: Part , Object
The Curse of Knowledge and the Semantic Web
2007-11-16 00:27:00 The Curse of Knowledge : the more you know, the more difficult it is for you to communicate knowledge. When we know something, we can hardly imagine not knowing it. The more we learn about something, the more it becomes even harder for us to think of not knowing it. It is generally difficult for experts (who know much) to explain their expertise to laymen (who know little) because experts have to try hard to imagine the scenario when they were not experts. This is the Curse of Knowledge. There are many examples of the Curse of Knowledge in the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written by Chip and Dan Heath. One famous example is the experiment of "tappers" and "listeners." A tapper heard a well-known song, such as "Happy Birthday to You" or "The Star-Spangled Banner," and then he tapped out the rhythm to a listener by knocking on a table. After hearing the rhythm being tapped, a listener was then asked to tell the name of the song. According to the book, a... More About: Semantic Web
ESWC 2008: 5th European Semantic Web Conference
2007-11-14 20:53:00 The 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008 ) is being held in Tenerife, Spain from June 1 to June 5, 2008. The conference is still in its early organizational stage so a list of speakers has not yet been included, nor has a schedule been set for the presentations. ESWC 2008 will feature a tutorial program, system descriptions and demos, a posters track, a Ph.D. symposium and a number of collocated workshops. They welcome application papers which clearly show the benefits of Semantic Web technologies in practical settings, but hurry, the deadline for full paper submission is December 14, 2007! Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to: Ontology Management (creation, evolution, evaluation, etc.) Ontology Alignment (mapping, matching, merging, mediation and reconciliation) Ontology Learning and Metadata Generation (e.g. HLT and ML approaches) Multimedia and Semantic Web Semantic Annotation of Data Semantic Web Trust, Privacy, Security and I... More About: Rope
Updates Made to RDF Review Vocabulary
2007-11-14 19:38:00 Danny Ayers has updated the RDF Review Vocabulary with a handful of new terms (suggested by ITerating and Revyu, two entities currently deploying this vocabulary), and also made it OWL DL-friendly. He's also set it up as a GRDDL-enabled HTML meta data profile for the hReview microformat. He says still has some debugging to do, and wants to put together a diagram showing the classes and properties. The Review Vocabulary was created for the purpose of creating sharable reviews and ratings of blogs, podcasts, music, books, software, (i.e. anything identifiable). The vocabulary is suitable for use in any RDF-compatible language: FOAF, DOAP, RSS etc. It is also compatible with the hReview microformat.Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion! More About: Updates , Made
Thinking Space is Now Available in Chinese!
2007-11-14 19:14:00 Yihong Ding, contributing author of Semantic Focus, has released a Chinese language version of his Thinking Space blog. For now he'll be translating his existing articles from English to Chinese, but as time goes on he says he may post exclusive articles for his Chinese-speaking audience. If you prefer reading about the Semantic Web in Chinese then this is the blog for you!Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
RDF-DAWG Published New SPARQL Proposed Recommendations
More articles from this author:2007-11-14 18:46:00 The RDF Data Access Working Group has published the following three SPARQL Prop osed Recommendations: SPARQL Query Language for RDF Defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs. SPARQL Query Results XML Format Defines an XML format for the variable binding and boolean results formats. SPARQL Protocol for RDF Uses WSDL 2.0 to describe an HTTP protocol for conveying SPARQL queries to an SPARQL query processing service and returning the query results to the party that made the request. Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion! More About: Published , Dati 1, 2, 3 |
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