Introduction

Semantic Universe has begun producing linked data for its Enterprise Data World and Semantic Technology Conferences. There were several motivations behind this effort.

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Did you hear that sound this week? The giant whooshing sound? There was a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Semantic Web academics, implementors and enthusiasts sighed in unison and their critics were silenced. I believe something wonderful has happened.

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When most people think about "semantic" or "Semantic Web"-based software, they tend to think about applications that are quite explicit about their use of RDF, SKOS and OWL. While these types of applications are clearly becoming more popular, the vast majority of people have no clue why they should care about such things.

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When people think about orchestration efforts, they tend to think about centralized, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)-based efforts. The service elements are published into reusable components that can be stitched together into workflows. This vision of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) allows central metrics of use and stability, but it precludes a common use case familiar to Unix users.

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Last week’s announcement that HTTP PATCH has been adopted as an official verb via RFC 5789 has generated a lot of excitement (and questions). As a summary, the intention of each verb is:

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RelFinder, a new Adobe Flex-based application, has been announced by a collection of researchers from the University of Stuttgart, the Carlos III University of Madrid and the University of Duisburg-Essen. Additional contributions have been made by individuals from the University of Leipzig and AKSW.

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While doing preparation for some upcoming talks, I noticed that the FOAF specification had been updated to version 0.97 in January. It had been quite some time since there had been activity on this vocabulary so it is good to see some love shown to it. According to the specification, some of the new changes include:

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Last week, the Second Linked Data Meetup London was held at the University of London Union. There were several compelling presentations discussed on Twitter  including the BBC’s use of Linked Data for their Wildlife Finder app. One of the many promising topics to emerge from the day was the introduction of a new Linked Data API. While there have been other Linked Data APIs (Pubby and irON), this API has the more narrow goal of lowering the bar for non-SemWeb developers to access these rich data collections. It is intended as a simple RESTful layer that returns JSON representations of RDF collections backed by a SPARQL endpoint. The API was primarily developed by Dave Reynolds, Jeni Tennison and Leigh Dodds. At the "How the Web of Data Will Be Won" talk by Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan, they emphasized that extending their successes on exposing government data in a linked fashion will require a focus on usability to attract new developers.

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