Michael Uschold of Semantic Arts has offered an answer to the question, how can you ensure that an ontology is easy to use? Uschold responds, “This is a complex and multi-faceted issue. The answer depends on the audience, who have varying degrees of a) knowledge in the domain, b) technical background, c) awareness of what the ontology is for and d) need to directly work with the ontology. For everyone, and especially non-technical people, it is important for there to be natural language comments explaining the meaning of the concepts. It is helpful to have an overview of the ontology which has only the top few dozen classes and relationships (like a UML class diagram).”

He goes on, “It is good to have HTML documents that can be automatically generated from various tools.  It should be possible to seamlessly move between levels of detail from the very general to the very specific ban back.  Read more

SKOS, which stands for Simple Knowledge Organization System, is a W3C standard, based on other Semantic Web standards (RDF and OWL), that provides a way to represent controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri. Specifically, SKOS itself is an OWL ontology and it can be written out in any RDF syntax.

Before we dive into SKOS, what is the difference between Controlled Vocabulary, Taxonomy and Thesaurus?

A controlled vocabulary is a list of terms which a community or organization has agreed upon. For example: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday are the days of the week.

A taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary organized in a hierarchy. For example, we can have the terms Computer, Tablet and Laptop and the concepts Tablet and Laptop are subclasses of Computer because a Tablet and Laptop are types of Computers.

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Lee Feigenbaum of CMSWire has written an article discussing the “what” and “why” of semantic web technologies. He writes, “In my first article on The Semantic Web and the Modern Enterprise, I introduced the vision of the Semantic Web. I also discussed how the progress made while working towards that vision provides a strong foundation to help enterprises better deal with their information management challenges. In this article, we’ll take a high-level look at what the core Semantic Web technologies are, why they’re different from conventional technology approaches and how they deliver tangible benefits for enterprise information management.” Read more

Cambridge Semantics continues to add new lessons at Semantic University. Some of the latest tutorials include:

What is Linked Data? – “This lesson is a short video lecture from Manu Sporny. He forgoes PowerPoint for whimsical, hand-drawn pieces of paper and hand gestures to introduce the subject of Linked Data for non-technical people. This lessons is more approachable than the longer, more in-depth Introduction to Linked Data, which you should visit after watching the video.” Read more

There has always been a misconception between the relationship of RDF and XML. The main difference: XML is a syntax while RDF is a data model.

RDF has several syntaxes (Turtle, N3, etc) and XML is one of those (known as RDF/XML). Actually, RDF/XML is the only W3C standard syntax for RDF (Currently, there is Last Call on Turtle, a new W3C standard syntax for RDF). Therefore, comparing XML and RDF is like comparing apples with oranges. What can be compared is their data models. The RDF data model is a graph while the XML data model is a tree.

Comparing RDF with XML

Joshua Tauberer has an excellent comparison between RDF and XML, which I recommend. Two advantages of RDF are highlighted: flexibility of the data model and use of URIs as global unique identifiers.

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A new presentation from the ICWE Conference is available online. The presentation is titled An Introduction to SPARQL and Queries over Linked Data: “Nowadays, more and more datasets are published on the Web adhering to the Linked Data principles. The availability of this data, including the existence of data-level connections between datasets, presents exciting opportunities for the next generation of Web-based applications. As a consequence, consuming Linked Data is a highly relevant topic in the context of Web engineering. Our introductory tutorial aims to provide participants with an understanding of one of the basic aspects of Linked Data consumption, that is, querying Linked Data.” Read more

Thanks everyone for participating in the #SemWebRox Community Challenge!

Looking at the results (which have been pasted at the end of this article for convenience), I’m struck once again by the diversity of points of view in the Semantic Web community on what the key value of its technology really is. Over at Semantic University we summarized what we believe to be the two dominant camps (summary: AI-centric and flexible data management-centric) in the Semantic Web world, and the results of this exercise illustrate clearly that there are many nuances within those camps.

I’ll go into some highlights, but I think the why is still missing in many cases.  It’s the classic features-not-value predicament that plagues technologists and frustrates technology marketers.  We’re doing better, but we can and must do better still.

Data Flexibility: Data Integration

In terms of data flexibility, there are a number of themes that kept popping up.  Aaron Bradley first called out “cheaper enterprise data integration, and Lee Feigenbaum concurred by stating, “The Semantic Web is the only scalable approach for integrating diverse data.”  Another one I liked about data integration was from Abir: “Semantic Web technologies can make it possible to have true bottom-up web-scale automatic information integration.”

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As a community, we Semantic Webbers have done a poor job communicating our value clearly and concisely.

Last week, I stated the case in more detail at the Enterprise Semantics Blog, and Aaron Bradley continued it over at Google Plus (here and here).

Today, I bring you a challenge.

Describe a value of the Semantic Web clearly in 140 characters. Tweet it with the hashtag #SemWebRox.

Why a value and not the value? Because different people have different opinions on what the most important facet of the Semantic Web is. And since you can’t have more than one most important value, just stick to one, and make it convincing.

Why 140 characters? It’s not just Twitter. Restricting space in this way forces you to get the core of your argument. No elaboration. No amendments. Straight value.

Here is my attempt:

#SemanticWeb technologies are extremely flexible, saving time and money in any situation facing unsure or changing requirements. #SemWebRox

— Rob Gonzalez (@chirping_gonzo) June 25, 2012

Write yours here or tweet it directly. We’ll aggregate them and include in a future post!

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s new School of Data has announced several ways that Semantic Web professionals can get involved. According to the site, “The School of Data is a friendly and inclusive community of people who are enthusiastic about working with data. Whether you are an experienced data wrangler, a beginner keen to gain skills and help others, or an organisation looking to join the School of Data partnership, there are many ways you can get involved with the School of Data.” Read more

Even as semantic web concepts and tools are underpinning revolutionary changes in the way we discover and consume information, people with even a casual interest in the semantic web have difficulty understanding how and why this is happening.  One of the most exciting application areas for semantic technologies is online publishing, although for thousands of small-to-medium sized publishers, unfamiliar semantic concepts are too intimidating to grasp the relevance of these technologies. This three-part series is part of my own journey to better understand how semantic technologies are changing the landscape for publishers of news and information.  Read Part 1.

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News and Media Organizations were well represented at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco this year.  Among the organizations presenting were the New York Times, the Associated Press (AP), the British Broadcasting Co. (BBC), Hearst Media Co., Agence France Press (AFP), and Getty Images.

It was interesting to note that, outside of the New York Times, which has been publishing a very detailed index since 1912, many news organizations presenting at the conference did not make the extensive classification of content a priority until the last decade or so.  It makes sense that, in a newspaper publishing environment, creating a detailed and involved index that guides every reader directly to a specific subject mentioned in the paper must not have seemed as critical as it does now– it’s not as though the reader was likely to keep the newspaper for future reference material– so the work of indexing news content by subject as a reference was left for the most part for librarians to do well after an article was published.

In the early days of the internet, categorization of content (where it existed) was limited to simple taxonomies or to free tagging.  News organizations made rudimentary attempts to identify subjects covered by content, but  did not provide much information  about relationships between these subjects.   Search functions matched the words in the search to the words in the content of the article or feature.   Most websites still organize their content this way.

The drawbacks of this approach to online publishing is that it doesn’t make the most of the content “assets” publishers possess.    Digital content has the potential to be either permanent or ephemeral– it can exist and be accessed by a viewer for as long as the publisher chooses to keep it, and many news organizations are beginning to realize the value of giving their material a longer shelf life by presenting it in different contexts.   If you have just read an article about, say, Hillary Clinton, you would might be interested in a related story about the State Department, or perhaps her daughter Chelsea, or her husband Bill….   But how would any content management system be able to serve up a related story if no one had bothered to indicate somewhere what the story is about and how these people and/or concepts are related to one another?

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