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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 4 of ISWC 2011 was the second full day of the conference and started out with a keynote from Frank van Harmelen, titled “10 Years of Semantic Web: does it work in theory?“  There were several sessions on RDF Querying of Multiple Sources, RDF Data Analysis, Formal Ontology & Patterns, Knowledge Representation Semantics, Web of Data, MANCHustifications and Provenance, the In Use track on Environmental data, the Semantic Web Challenge and a very exciting Deathmatch panel.

The main question addressed in the keynote was if a decade of Semantic Web work has helped to discover any Computer Science laws? Frank stated that what has been built in the past 10 years can be characterized in 3 parts:
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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany]

The Semantic Web Death Match: Industry vs Academica vs Standards at ISWC this week consisted of 5 panelists and Jim Hendler as the moderator. Each panelist summarized their point of view in a short phrase:

• Martin Hepp (Don’t shoot the messenger: the Fall of Constantinople)
• Michael Hausenblas (Now we have the basement, let’s go for the floors and the roof!)
• Chris Welty (Standards aren’t bad, just misunderstood)
• Ivan Herman (Did We forget about the client-side web applications’ world?)
• Ian Horrocks (Maybe the Web is the wrong application…)

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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 |  Day 2 |  Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 3 was the first full conference day. The past two days were dedicated only to tutorials and workshops on more specific topics. This year, ISWC turns 10 years old and they showed a tag cloud of the abstracts submitted in 2001 versus the tag cloud of the abstracts submitted this year. Not surprising, the word “data” appears much larger, the word “ontology” has maintained its size, the word “web” has almost disappeared while the word “query” appears now and barely appeared 10 years ago.

(tag cloud image after the jump)

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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 2 of ISWC consisted of 7 workshops and 3 tutorials. One of the most popular workshops was the Ontology Matching, which seems to be evolving to not only matching ontologies but also to matching instances, due to the rise of Linked Data. The Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems presented several works on RDF and NoSQL databases, such like cumulusRDF.

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[Editor's Note: In our most recent SemanticLink podcast with special guest R.V. Guha, we mentioned RDFa 1.1 Lite, proposed by Ben Adida at last month's Schema.org workshop. Thanks to Manu Sporny for sharing the following look at RDFa 1.1 Lite.]

Summary: RDFa 1.1 Lite is a simple subset of RDFa consisting of the following attributes: vocab, typeof, property, rel, about and prefix.

During the schema.org workshop, a proposal was put forth by RDFa’s resident hero, Ben Adida, for a stripped down version of RDFa 1.1, called RDFa 1.1 Lite. The RDFa syntax is often criticized as having too much functionality, leaving first-time authors confused about the more advanced features. This lighter version of RDFa will help authors easily jump into the Linked Data world. The goal was to create a very minimal subset that will work for 80% of the folks out there doing simple markup for things like search engines. Read more

On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

• Play the Podcast (1 hour)
• Subscribe to the Monthly Podcast
• See All Semantic Link Podcasts

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“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

Richard Padley, the Managing Director of Semantico, posted this week that the Semantic Web is dead.

I could not disagree more. Padley states that “we’ve yet to see many convincing practical uses for the technology.” I have seen many convincing, practical cases. We cover these stories daily here, and they have been presented at our conferences. The BBC, Best Buy, Overstock.com, the New York Times, Amdocs, the Library of Congress, the US Department of Defense, The British Museum… consumer facing apps like Siri, Seevl, and Attune… the list of companies using Semantic Web Technologies to make money and save money — to solve very real business problems — is long and growing.

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schema.org Leadership Panel; L-to-R: Michael O'Connor (Microsoft), John Giannandrea (Google), Charlie Jiang (Microsoft), Kavi Goel (Google), R.V. Guha (Google), Steve MacBeth (Microsoft), Gaurav Mishra (Yahoo), Peter Mika (Yahoo)

A room full of interested parties gathered in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus yesterday to discuss Schema.org, its implications on existing vocabularies, syntaxes, and projects, and how best to move forward with what has admittedly been a bumpy road.

Schema.org, you may recall, is the vocabulary for structured data markup that was released by Google, Microsoft, and Bing on June 2 of this year.  The schema.org website states, “A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.”  (For more history about the roll-out and initial reactions to it, here’s a summary.)

Yesterday was the first time since the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco that community members have gathered face-to-face to discuss Schema.org in an open forum. It was a full agenda with plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion.

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On Friday, September 9, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about the latest document around the RDF 1.1 standard (a Working Draft). The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, David Wood, Co-Chair of the RDF Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

David Wood, 3 Roundstones

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On Friday, August 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the ninth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

In this episode, they were joined by special guest Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a UK-based company focused on prevention of identity theft and financial fraud.*

Steve Harris CTO Garlik

* On Sept. 26, Steve will present, “Combating Online Crime with RDF” at SemTechBiz UK
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