The BBC has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on how Semantic Web Technologies are used on some of the BBC’s Web Sites. The main characteristics of the BBC’s approach is to use the Web as a Content Management System. Sites like the BBC Music, BBC Programmes, or the BBC Wildlife Finder rely on external, publicly available datasets like Musicbrainz or Wikipedia; the BBC sites themselves show an aggregated view of this information, put in a BBC context. Furthermore, the BBC also creates Web identifiers for every item it has interest in; RDF representations of these Web identifiers allow developers to use the BBC’s data to build applications.

The recent Linked Data Product Development Lab at MIT, billed as an opportunity to create the next killer app, was born out of its organizers’ desire to create both a highly adoptable, viral and compelling case for what sets semantic technology apart from the other kinds of technologies that people are playing with on the web — and also to create something that would be sustainable as either a business or open source project. The winner, LocalFocus, seems to have legs on both fronts, and its competitors present some interesting potential, as well.

The Lab’s co-chairs – K. Krasnow Waterman, who came to MIT as a Sloan Fellow and is a visiting fellow, DIG, CSAIL, MIT, and technology entrepreneur Reed Sturtevant — say they picked a cross-section of judges to ensure that both the technology and business viewpoints were accounted for in picking a winner. They included luminaries ranging from world wide web inventor and MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee and MIT Media Lab professor Alex Pentland, who’s also a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science, to serial entrepreneur Brian Shin, to VCs Alex Finkelstein from Spark Capital and Austin Westerling of Charles River Ventures, among others.

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The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths, which
defines a more succinct way to write parts of basic graph patterns and also extend matching of triple pattern to arbitrary length paths. The group also published six updates, namely:

• SPARQL 1.1 Query adds support for aggregates, subqueries, projected expressions, and negation to the SPARQL query language.
• SPARQL 1.1 Update defines an update language for RDF graphs.
• SPARQL 1.1 Protocol for RDF defines an abstract interface and HTTP bindings for a protocol to issue SPARQL Query and SPARQL Update statements against a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Service Description defines a vocabulary and discovery mechanism for describing the capabilities of a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs describes the use of the HTTP protocol for managing named RDF graphs on an HTTP server.
• SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes defines conditions under which SPARQL queries can be used with entailment regimes such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.