Bob DuCharme recently wrote on his blog, “I think I’ve figured it out… Here’s how to sell the Semantic Web and Linked Data visions to the Big Data folk: don’t. Sell them on RDF technology. The process of selling a set of technologies usually means selling a vision, getting people psyched about that vision, and then telling them about the technology that implements that vision. For RDF technology (by which I mean RDF, SPARQL, and optionally, RDFS and OWL), the vision for many years was the Semantic Web. Some people in that community eventually decided that an easier vision to sell was Linked Data. (Linked Data may not always include RDF technology—when Tim Berners-Lee added ‘(RDF*, SPARQL)’ to his list of Linked Data principles, it became the filioque controversy of the Linked Data community—but the boundaries of this or other sets of technologies I’m discussing are not the issue here. The point is, it’s very common to use the Linked Data vision to sell people on the value of using URIs, triples, and SPARQL together.)” Read more

Bob DuCharme has shared some interesting insights regarding SPARQL, RDF, and Big Data. He writes, “I think it’s obvious that SPARQL and other RDF-related technologies have plenty to offer to the overlapping worlds of Big Data and NoSQL, but this doesn’t seem as obvious to people who focus on those areas. For example, the program for this week’s Strata conference makes no mention of RDF or SPARQL. The more I look into it, the more I see that this flexible, standardized data model and query language align very well with what many of those people are trying to do.” Read more

Bob DuCharme, author and speaker, has provided an excellent example of one of the benefits RDF has over XML. In his example, DuCharme shows how to perform a simple federated query with RDF across two different address books. He writes, “Once, at an XML Summer School session, I was giving a talk about semantic web technology to a group that included several presenters from other sessions. This included Henry Thompson, who I’ve known since the SGML days. He was still a bit skeptical about RDF, and said that RDF was in the same situation as XML—that if he and I stored similar information using different vocabularies, we’d still have to convert his to use the same vocabulary as mine or vice versa before we could use our data together.” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ Vince Viloria

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/ Sarah_Ackerman

It’s that spooky time of year again – in your neighborhood and on the Semantic Web, too. Put on your goblin getups, and see how some semantic webbers and related sites are getting Halloween treats into their mix:

• We’ll start with a response we got to a query we posed about how you might have some fun with Halloween-oriented SPARQL queries. From Bob DuCharme, solutions architect at TopQuadrant, comes a query to extract a SKOS taxonomy of horror movies from DBpedia.

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If you missed the excellent live webcast introduction to SKOS by Bob DuCharme (of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL), the recorded webcast is now available.

You will probably find this webcast useful if: Read more

Date:	Thursday, October 6, 2011
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE

In August, we had the pleasure of hosting the excellent instructor, Bob DuCharme, as he walked us through an introduction to SPARQL: “SPARQL Queries, SPARQL Technology.” Next week, Bob will join us again, this time to introduce us to SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System standard.

Description:

You manage a taxonomy, thesaurus, or some other kind of controlled vocabulary using a proprietary tool or perhaps even by emailing around spreadsheets to each other. Read more

SPARQL is the standardized query language for RDF, the same way SQL is the standardized query language for relational databases. If this is the first time you look at SPARQL, but you’re familiar with SQL, you will see some similarities because it shares several keywords such as SELECT, WHERE, etc. It also has new keywords that you have never seen if you come from a SQL world such as OPTIONAL, FILTER and much more.

Recall that RDF is a triple comprised of a subject, predicate and object. A SPARQL query consists of a set of triples where the subject, predicate and/or object can consist of variables. The idea is to match the triples in the SPARQL query with the existing RDF triples and find solutions to the variables. A SPARQL query is executed on a RDF dataset, which can be a native RDF database, or on a Relational Database to RDF (RDB2RDF) system, such as Ultrawrap.  These databases have SPARQL endpoints which accept queries and return results via HTTP.

A basic example

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If you missed last week’s excellent introduction to SPARQL by Bob DuCharme of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this presentation, Bob shows how to create and run SPARQL queries. He also talks about the role that the query language can play in application development. Lastly, he looks at the range of uses people are finding for SPARQL above and beyond querying of RDF data, such as querying relational data, defining rules to enhance data quality, and more…

Watch the webcast here:

http://mediabistro.adobeconnect.com/p8mwns7kdgx/

There were some questions we did not get to during the hour, and Bob has been kind enough to answer these offline.

BONUS Q&A with Bob DuCharme:

Q: Can sparql engines integrate reasoners and reason over the data on the fly? Read more