The Journal of Web Semantics has another new publication this week, a special issue on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web. This issue was edited by Los Lehmann, Ivan Jose Varzinczak and Alan Bundy: “Its ten articles shed direct or indirect light on the role of context in Semantic Web theories and applications. Preprints of the papers are now available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.”

Some of the articles currently available online include the following: “ Representing and Querying Validity Time in RDF and OWL: A Logic-Based Approach by Boris Motik Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

The Semantic Web journal has issued a special call for surveys on application areas of semantic technologies. According to the article, “Semantic Web technologies are currently in a transition from research to practice. The amount of progress made in different application areas, however, differs significantly, as do the challenges which lie ahead. The Semantic Web journal calls for survey papers on the state of the art in research, development, and deployment of Semantic Web technologies in specific application areas and domains. Surveys should focus on one specific application area and discuss in a comprehensive way (1) its importance, (2) the particular (past, present, and future) challenges faced in applying Semantic technologies in this area, and (3) the state of the art in developing foundational principles and practical solutions related to this area.” Read more

Paul A. Houle, founder of Ontology2 recently reported that his company has announced “the beta release of the Ookaboo RDF Dump, which contains metadata for nearly 1,000,000 public domain and Creative Commons images of more than 500,000 specific topics from Dbpedia and Freebase. The Ookaboo RDF dump is released under a CC-BY-SA license that is friendly to both academic and commericial use. With precision in excess of 0.98, Ookaboo enables entirely new applications for image search and classification.” Read more

Over the last two years Wikipedia has benefited from a number of Wikipedians in Residence, people who make data from the cultural institutions they work at available to Wikipedia. The article states, “It was just under two years ago when Liam Wyatt proposed a concept that seemed so bold, it required the British Museum to run a risk assessment before they’d agree to it. Liam suggested that he serve as the ‘Wikipedian in Residence,’ a role that would allow him to put into practice the idea that cultural institutions should share their knowledge with Wikipedia.” Read more

Eric Hoffer, a regular contributor to our SemanticLink podcasts, has commented on the most recent episode (available here). Hoffer notes, “Our latest Semantic-Link discussion was interesting in that it touched on some distinct but deep topics that tend to recur in our discussions, namely: usability, privacy and the old standby – the definition of semantics itself. I won’t spend any more time on the definition of semantics beyond that the consensus (for purposes of this discussion) was that it means ‘meaning’, with contexts including: linguistic/NLP related word-meaning semantics; and the other being compliance with W3C standards – or architectural Semantics.  In essence, the latter is what enables a machine version of the former.” Read more

Stephan Zednik has been working on the problem of accurately characterizing quality for science data products. He writes, “Science product quality is hard to define, characterize, and act upon. Product quality reflects a comparison against standard products of a similar kind, but it is also reflective of the fitness-for-use of the product for the end-user. Users weigh quality characteristics (e.g. accuracy, completeness, coverage, consistency, representativeness) based on their intended use for the data, and therefore quality of a product can be different based on different users’ needs and interests.  Despite the subjective nature of quality assertions, and their sensitivity to users fitness-for-use, most quality information is provided by the product producer and the subjective criteria used to determine quality is opaque, if available at all.” 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

Anna Powell-Smith of the Open Domesday project recently shared her experiences working to make a historically fascinating data set freely available. She writes, “Domesday Book might be one of the most famous government datasets ever created. Which makes it all the stranger that it’s not freely available online – at the National Archives, you have to pay £2 per page to download copies of the text. Domesday is pretty much unique. It records the ownership of almost every acre of land in England in 1066 and 1086 – a feat not repeated in modern times. It records almost every household. It records the industrial resources of an entire nation, from castles to mills to oxen.” Read more

The W3C Provenance Working Group recently announced that the group “has published a new Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. Provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, users find information that is often contradictory or questionable: provenance can help those users to make trust judgments. PROV-DM is a data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and activities involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world.” Read more

Steven VanRoekel and Aneesh Chopra recently shared some exciting news about the growing reach of open government initiatives. They wrote, “Last week, President Obama’s unprecedented efforts to advance open and transparent Government reached an important milestone. As part of a joint effort by the United States and India to build an open government platform, the U.S. team has deposited open source code– an important benchmark in developing the Open Government Platform that will enable governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites.” Read more