Today, the World Wide Web Consortium announced that R2RML has achieved Recommendation status. As stated on the W3C website, R2RML is “a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author’s choice.” In the life cycle of W3C standards creation, today’s announcement means that the specifications have gone through extensive community review and revision and that R2RML is now considered stable enough for  wide-spread distribution in commodity software.

Richard Cyganiak, one of the Recommendation’s editors, explained why R2RML is so important. “In the early days of the Semantic Web effort, we’ve tried to convert the whole world to RDF and OWL. This clearly hasn’t worked. Most data lives in entrenched non-RDF systems, and that’s not likely to change.”

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If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.

In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Andreas Blumauer, the CEO of  Semantic Web Company. Semantic Web Company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and their software extracts meaning from big data using linked data technologies. In this interview Andreas describes some of the their core products to us in more detail.

Sean: Hi Andreas. Can you give us a little background on your company? When did you get started in the Semantic Web?

Andreas: As an offspring of a ‘typical’ web agency from the early days of the internet, we became a specialized provider in 2004: The ‘Semantic Web School’ focused on research, consulting and training in the area of the semantic web. We learned quickly how the idea of a ‘semantic web’ was able to trigger a lot of great project visions but also, that most of the tools from the early days of the semantic web were rather scary for enterprises. In 2007 we experienced that information professionals began to search for grown-up semantic web solutions to improve their information infrastructure. We were excited that ‘our’ main topics obviously began to play a role in the development of IT-strategies in many organizations. We refocused on the development of software and renamed our company.

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Google has announced the addition of a “Structured Data Dashboard” as a new feature in its Webmaster Tools offerings. The Dashboard gives webmasters greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for a given website. This will no doubt come as good news to people wanting confirmation that Google was consuming the structured data being published.

Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool has been around for a while and allows webmasters to see how their semantic markup might appear in a Rich Snippet. There are tools that allow developers to test semantic markup during the development process. However, until now there has not been a good way for a webmaster to see how (or even if) Google was consuming the structured markup in a given site.

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Last week, we published Under the Hood: A Closer Look at Information WorkBench, an interview with Peter Haase conducted by Kristen Milhollin as part of her series on Dynamic Semantic Publishing.

We are pleased to announce that FluidOps has created a viewer for the SemTechBiz conference program in Information Workbench.  The viewer is a good example of a faceted, semantic viewer for the conference program data, including map, timeline, and graph views, and tying in data from disparate sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and the conference program itself.

You can view this event browser here:
http://conference-explorer.fluidops.net/resource/semtech:semtech-SF-2012

Of course, we have the conference agenda-at-a-glance here, and will make the program available to conference attendees via the Guidebook app for mobile devices, but this is an interesting example of Semantic Technology at work in a human-friendly user interface.

Thanks to Peter Haase and the FluidOps team for this work!

fluid Operations’ Information Workbench is part of the semantic infrastructure supporting the BBC’s revolutionary coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.  Below is a conversation with fluid Operations Senior Architect for Research & Development Michael Schmidt in advance of his 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference presentation. This conversation is a supplement to the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Is the Information Workbench a response to the need for more robust applications to help process “Big Data”? How is it different than other popular tools?

A. Dealing with Big Data involves a number of different challenges, including increasing volume (amount of data), complexity (of schemas and structures), and variety (range of data types, sources).

However, most Big Data solutions available on the market today focus on volume only, in particular supporting vertical scalability (greater operating capacity, efficiency, and speed.)   This means that such solutions mainly address the analysis of large volumes of similarly structured data sets. Yet the Big Data problem is not fully solved only by technologies that help you process similarly structured data more quickly and efficiently.

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Ontology2 has announced the release of :BaseKB Early Access 2 (EA2), a tool for accessing Freebase data in RDF.

Paul Houle, founder of Ontology 2, says, “:BaseKB is an important milestone for both Freebase and the Semantic Web. :BaseKB opens Freebase to users of SPARQL and other RDF standards.  The superior quality of Freebase data solves data quality problems that have,  so far,  frustrated Linked Data applications.”

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The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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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.

Manu Sporny

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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Are you wondering why your product pages don’t stand out in search results like those from Amazon (shown below) or other competing e-commerce websites? These expanded results are commonly known as Rich Snippets (as named by Google) and are the result of having your HTML structured correctly with semantic markup. Whether you’re savvy to HTML5 and the latest design trends, or you haven’t updated your website code in years, this is article will explain why it’s important you structure your data properly utilizing semantic standards.

There are a number of ways to structure your data to make it more relevant to search engines, as well as social media sites. As an e-commerce retailer it is important to understand which of these standards you should consider including in your website. You should take some time to ensure you are implementing semantic markup, and doing it correctly. It has the power to better inform potential customers with upfront knowledge prior to landing on your site. Customers can see product reviews, pricing and stock information, and even images before clicking through to your website. This can lead to increased click-through rates, improve conversions, and generally enhance your SEO objectives.

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