Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reports that Morgan & Claypool Publishers have decided to release an unfinished manuscript written by Aaron Swartz entitled A Programmable Web. Michael B. Morgan, CEO of the publishing house wrote, “In 2009, we invited Aaron Swartz to contribute a short work to our series on Web Engineering (now The Semantic Web: Theory and Technology). He produced a draft of about 40 pages — a ‘first version’ to be extended later — which unfortunately never happened.” Read more

A website called BigML (for Big Machine Learning) has compiled a great list of freely available public data sources. The article begins: “We love data, big and small and we are always on the lookout for interesting datasets. Over the last two years, the BigML team has compiled a long list of sources of data that anyone can use. It’s a great list for browsing, importing into our platform, creating new models and just exploring what can be done with different sets of data. In this post, we are sharing this list with you. Why? Well, searching for great datasets can be a time consuming task. We hope this list will support you in that search and help you to find some inspiring datasets. ” Read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium reports that the organization has adopted Semantic annotations in OGC standards as an OGC Best Practice. The article states, “OGC standards provide standard ways of locating and transporting network-resident geospatial data and ways of locating and invoking geospatial services. Without proper descriptions of these resources, however, use of the resources is limited to small user groups. To make a geospatial resource more widely discoverable, assessable and useful, resource providers must annotate the resource with descriptive metadata that can be read and understood by a broad audience. Without such metadata, people will neither be able to find the resource using search engines nor will they be able to evaluate if the discovered resource satisfies their current information need.” Read more

Healthline Networks and Visual Health Solutions and Denver’s leading healthcare system, HealthONE, today announced a partnership to provide patients and physicians with Healthline’s BodyMaps application via the HealthONE website, www.HealthONEcares.com.

BodyMaps demystifies complex aspects of health by combining Healthline’s unique semantic taxonomy and Visible Health Solution’s high-quality anatomical content into a unique interactive 3D experience for users to visually explore the human body, from its largest organ to its smallest bone. BodyMaps also maps thousands of anatomical and clinical terms to simple patient-friendly synonyms, making it understandable to anyone. Read more

Leigh Dodds has drafted a diagram illustrating relationships between resources in an effort to understand and describe Dataset and API discovery in Linked Data. He writes, “While there’s been lots of research done on finding and using (semantic) web services I’m initially interested in supporting the kind of bootstrapping use cases covered by Autodiscovery. We can characterise that use case as helping to answer the following kinds of questions: Given a resource URI, how can I find out which dataset it is from? Given a dataset URI, how can I find out which resources it contains and which APIs might let me interact with it? Given a domain on the web, how can I find out whether it exposes some machine-readable data? Where is the SPARQL endpoint for this dataset?” Read more

Ivan Herman of the W3C reports, “W3C published the Second Edition of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). RIF was developed through a joint effort of members of the Business Rules, Semantic Web, and Logic Programming communities. It allows rules systems to be connected together for highly-structured knowledge to be accurately exchanged as explained in RIF Use Cases and Requirements. The Second Edition includes editorial improvements and a number of small corrections to the original specification, along with a new RIF Primer.” Read more

Sam Leon of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Boundless, the open source digital textbook provider, is releasing all of its 18 open source textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. We covered the progress of this brilliant initiative mid-way through last year. Boundless leverages open content on the web, whether that’s information on Wikipedia or digital copies of public domain artworks, to produce textbooks that are free for everyone to access. Boundless provides an alternative to traditional textbooks that are out of reach to many given their often hefty price tags. We’re really excited to see that the company is now making all its content available under such a permissive license that will maximise re-use of this material but make sure that those who have spent time compiling and writing these resources are attributed.” Read more

Katie Ingram of CMS Wire reports, “Semantic content enrichment solutions provider, Temis has announced it will be releasing a beta version of its online collaboration platform, the Luxid Community. Founded in 2000, Temis has worked on providing collaboration solutions and improving how information assets are managed. For example, in late 2011 it integrated its Luxid semantic enrichment tool with Nuxeo. With the Luxid Community Platform, Temis will give users in the semantic content enrichment field the ability to meet with colleagues, exchange practices, work on projects and share information.” Read more

Collegeseekr.com, a semantic college search engine, has announced “the release of search by map, allowing users to refine any of their searches visually. This new search feature leverages their existing search technology and page layout. It is activated by users checking a box above the map view of their search results. Once activated the map search technology will automatically update a user’s search results as the map is moved around.” Read more

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Eric

Eric Franzon
VP Community
SemanticWeb.com