A new paper is currently available for download entitled OWL: Yet to arrive on the Web of Data? The paper was written by Birte Glimm, Aidan Hogan, Markus Krötzsch, and Axel Polleres. The abstract states, “Seven years on from OWL becoming a W3C recommendation, and two years on from the more recent OWL 2 W3C recommendation, OWL has still experienced only patchy uptake on the Web. Although certain OWL features (like owl:sameAs) are very popular, other features of OWL are largely neglected by publishers in the Linked Data world.” Read more

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Simply put, RDFa is another syntax for RDF. The interesting aspect of RDFa is that it is embedded in HTML. This means that you can state what things on your HTML page actually mean. For example, you can specify that a certain text is the title of a blog post or it’s the name of a product or it’s the price for a certain product. This is starting to be commonly known as “adding semantic markup”.

Historically, RDFa was specified only for XHTML. Currently, RDFa 1.1 is specified for XHTML and HTML5. Additionally, RDFa 1.1 works for any XML-based language such as SVG. Recently, RDFa Lite was introduced as “a small subset of RDFa consisting of a few attributes that may be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup tasks.” It is important to note that RDFa is not the only way to add semantics to your webpages. Microdata and Microformats are other options, and I will discuss this later on. As a reminder, you can publish your data as Linked Data through RDFa. Inside your markup, you can link to other URIs or others can link to your HTML+RDFa webpages.

Why publish RDFa? Read more

I often read blogs and watch conference presentations extolling the virtues and benefits of adopting Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques & technologies. It makes me wonder how those new to the field ever get through the blizzard of acronyms and techno-speak, to understand what is being promoted and how it might be relevant to them and their business.  In this post I will attempt to demystify and identify the core benefits of Linked Data without burying you in LD-speak!

Let me start with the web itself.  Imagine if you will that you have just returned from desert island exile for the last decade and a half. You are introduced to the web and start using Google searching to find out what this web thing is all about. You are assailed with an overwhelming array of acronyms terms and concepts – Ajax, Javascript, HTML, CSS, HTTP, XML, DOM, URL, Flash, RDFa, JSON, Microformats, SEO – argh! where do you begin?  However after some digging it becomes clear that there is a blindingly simple concept at the core that only uses three of them: HTML – a simple markup language to describe how a web page should be laid out, URL – a globally unique way to address a page on the Internet, HTTP – a simple way to request and receive a page across the Internet. Read more

The Journal of Web Semantics has released volume 10, a special issue on Scalability edited by Jeff Heflin and Heiner Struckenschmidt: “Preprints from the issue, which includes a short introduction and four research papers, are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.” The preprints include an editorial by Heflin and Struckenschmidt entitled Web-Scale Semantic Information Processing.

Other preprint articles currently available online include the following: Scalable Distributed Indexing and Query Processing over Linked Data by Marcel Karnstedt, Kai-Uwe Sattler and Manfred Hauswirth; Searching Web Data: an Entity Retrieval and High-Performance Indexing Model by Renaud Delbru, Stephane Campinas and Giovanni Tummarello Read more

A new whitepaper is available for free via Refinder. The paper entitled Semantic Technologies Tap Unrealized Potentials of Social Business Platforms was written by Franz Jachim, Leo Sauermann and Bernhard Schandl. The abstract states, “Social technologies and collaboration tools start to find broad acceptance in the enterprise domain. As well, semantic technologies have been around for a while, offering a range of benefits in the handling of information, including the pervasive linking of content, fostering new forms of content discovery and navigation, and improving content metadata and information retrieval.” Read more

The Semantic Web Company has released a new book in conjunction with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) entitled Linked Open Data: The Essentials. Martin Kaltenbock reports, “Linked Open Data: The Essentials – is a a quick start guide for decision makers who need to quickly get up to speed with the Linked Open Data (LOD) concept and who want to make their organisation a part of this movement.” Read more

Christine Connors has written a short history of classification, noting how today’s taxonomies play into the grand scheme of things. Connors begins, “The earliest known means of classifying an object and keeping it in order are girginakku. These are ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets that were attached to scrolls and tablets and used to identify the contents. Examples of approximately 5300 years in age can be found in the British Museum. Girginakku at Glencairn. These clay tablets were used for many purposes, including cataloging. The famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt housed one of the earliest forms of library catalog in the third century BCE. The library reportedly housed more than 120,000 scrolls which were stored in bins categorized by subject.” Read more

This year’s National Retail Foundation’s Annual Convention & EXPO, also known as “Retail’s Big Show,” is going to feature a session entitled Profiting from Semantic Web in Retail: The new tool of successful practioners in Customer Experience and Operations. The session will be led by Mphasis, an HP company. According to the description, “IT and data practices have always needed humans to interpret the data and act on results. The Semantic Web aims to make data intelligible to computer systems, and is already leading to applications where computer systems replicate the nuanced decision making of humans. In this session we introduce Semantic Web concepts and ways in which retailers are already putting it to use to enhance customer experience and achieve orders of magnitude changes in operating efficiency.” Read more

Louise Jack has asked, “If so many people’s jobs are touched by the Internet and digital technology, then how come so few of us have even a basic understanding of how things work? This is the fundamental question behind a new course in the U.K. called Decoded, which promises to teach people how to code in one day.”

Steve Henry, one of the creators of the class stated, “The Internet is beyond doubt the prime medium for communications and commerce. Unlike TV, it’s a two-way tool. And yet how many people know how it works? Probably less than 3%.” Read more

“How would you explain RDF to my grandmother?  I still don’t get it…” a student recently asked of David Wood, CTO of 3Roundstones. Wood was speaking to a class called “Linked Data Ventures” and was made up of students from the MIT Computer Science Department and the Sloan School of Business. He responded by creating a slide deck and subsequent video explaining the Resource Description Framework using the classic Dr. Seuss style of rhyming couplets and the characters Thing 1 and Thing 2.

I hope this student’s grandmother found this as enjoyable as I did. (Video after the jump). Read more