[Editor's Note: SemanticWeb.com was a co-sponsor of the Linked Data Platform proposal that led to the creation of the Linked Data Platform Working Group discussed here.]

Ian Jacobs reports, “Shortly after W3C announced the launch of the Linked Data Platform Working Group, I spoke with Arnaud Le Hors about IBM’s interest in linked data and their decision to co-chair the Working Group.” Asked why IBM became involved with organizing the Linked Enterprise Data Patterns Workshop and the Linked Data Platform Working Group, Le Hors responded, “IBM has been involved in Semantic Web activities from the beginning, but primarily from a research perspective. Until recently we had no products using the technology. Now we have IBM Rational, which develops a set of tools for application and product lifecycle management (requirements, bugs, etc.). Other parts of IBM are actively exploring it for complementary purposes. Customers typically use tools from more than one vendor and require integration; this is a problem IBM addresses.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved. The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.” Read more

Mike Bergman reports that the latest UMBEL release includes schema.org and GeoNames support. He writes, “We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org and  GeoNames. UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.” Read more

Today Data.gov celebrates its third anniversary. An announcement on the site noted, “The first national open data site, Data.gov led the way in opening government data around the world. Now 30 countries host open data sites and they are key tools in the global open government movement. Growing from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 datasets today, Data.gov reaches across 172 federal agencies to bring data to innovators, developers, analysts and citizens across the nation. The data shows up in smart phone apps, websites, and information that lets people buy smarter, use energy more efficiently, and find better health-care solutions each day.” Read more

Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig of the Google Research Team have posted an article about their new paper on dictionaries for linking text, entities, and ideas. They write, “Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.” Read more

3M has opened up the 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary under an agreement with the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to the article, “The 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary will provide the core technology to enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), making it possible to share medical knowledge and secure patient data between care providers at U.S. military treatment facilities located around the world and VA Medical Centers. Access to actionable clinical information whenever and wherever care is delivered will enable safer, better coordinated, and higher quality care for the country’s 32 million veterans, active service members, and their families.” Read more

A new article reports, “After months of gratuitous hard work and cooperation by higher education students and experts, the Spanish version of DBpedia, also known as the Spanish Semantic Wikipedia, has finally come into being. The Spanish DBpedia contains 70 million data that account for 80% of the information in the Spanish Wikipedia and now rivals other languages like English or French… DBpedia is a project for extracting Wikipedia data and building a semantic version of this Internet encyclopaedia. It is a community effort for extracting structured information from the Wikipedia and making it accessible on the Web.” Read more

A New Framework for Querying Semantic Networks, a paper that was presented at Museums and the Web 2012, is now available online. The paper was written by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H. Crete–Greece. The abstract states, “The upcoming large-scale metadata repositories, semantic networks of Resource Description Framework triples integrating large amounts of cultural–historical data, are not easily accessible to global query paradigms, such as ‘query by example’ or keyword search. ISO21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) is an adequate global schema for such systems, but querying individually hundreds of different kinds of properties leaves a huge recall gap compared to text retrieval, whereas a global restriction to ‘core metadata,’ such as Dublin Core, deprives the systems of any more advanced integration and reasoning capability.” Read more

Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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