Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Few semantic web or linked data applications are using as many knowledge bases — 40 — as RKBExplorer, which was born of the ReSIST Project, funded by the European Union under the 6th Framework Information Society Technologies program.

Developed by Hugh Glaser of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the tool is designed to help scientists developing systems that require exceptional resilience by identifying indirect but potentially significant inter-relationships between people, publications, and projects. The application presents a unified view of the resources, mediated by an ontology, on academic research that can be accessed using semantic web standards.

“During the project we engineered to use about 40 different knowledge bases and smushed URIs between them for a unified view, as you expect in the semantic web or the linked data web,” says Glaser.

It cast as wide a net as possible for data sources, winding up with semantic repositories of data, which contain and publish RDF and co-reference data, supplied by the likes of Cordis (the Community Research and Development Information Service, is an information resource dedicated to European research and development activities); the National Science Foundation; and the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography.

“When you do this you find yourself generating the linked data yourself,” says Glaser. “It’s only just beginning to get to stage where you can then seamlessly utilize other linked data sites for real applications, rather than for just pedagogical research tools.”

The work required building the CRS (Consistent Service Reference) infrastructure for doing distributed queries across the entire infrastructure, to resolve which other URIs are considered to be the same non-information resource among all the knowledge bases. Glaser also came across another issue that had to be resolved that is common when databases are built — that is, mistaking two separate entities with the same name as the same person and smushing them together. As an outgrowth of RKBExplorer Glaser has launched sameas.org, to find co-references among difference data sets across the web of data where there are many equivalent URIs. “That provides the linkage with the semantic web which I think we need,” Glaser says.

Yet, Glaser couldn’t imagine that he, in conjunction with a research fellow at the school, would have been able to deliver the application and the infrastructure behind it in just three years had they gone the classic database and portal-building route.

“The flexibility of linked data really allowed us to go ahead and build a more flexible system in that time. It’s a very open system,” he says. “When systems are open people start to use them.” The same is true when people don’t actually have to recognize that it’s a semantic web application: “That’s how it should be,” Glaser says. “If you’re not showing RDF it looks just like any other mashup — but much more dynamic.”

The infrastructure behind RKBExplorer is domain-agnostic, so Glaser sees many other ways the tool can be deployed outside the realm of resilient systems. For example, the Chinese Academy of Science has a mandate around the use of intellectual property among its small and medium size enterprises, and wants to build a system to support that. Such a system could be built as an open distributed knowledge environment that links multiple resources to facilitate such technology transfers.

Says Glaser, “We’re trying to live the semantic web dream.”

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!