What’s the path from an XML based e-government metadata application to a linked data version? At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the road taken by the Dutch government will be described by Paul Hermans, lead architect of Belgian project Erfgoedplus.be, which uses RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects, people, place and time.

Some 1,000 individual organizations compose the Dutch government, each with their own websites. An effort to employ a search engine a few years ago to spider those different and separate web sites to have one single point of access didn’t work as anticipated. The next step to bring some order was to assign all the documents published on those sites a common kernel of metadata fields, which led to building an XML application to enable a structured approach. Linked Data entered the picture about a year and a half ago.

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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning 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!

A recent post by Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for the W3C, takes a look at the primary discussions that have been sparked since the emergence of schema.org and what the semantic web community needs to talk about next. The first major topic of discussion, according to the article, has been, “What is the evolution path of the schema.org vocabularies; how do they relate to vocabulary developments around the world that has already brought us such widely used vocabularies like Dublin Core, GoodRelations, FOAF, vCard, the different microformat vocabularies, etc?” Read more

You know Volkswagen as Das Auto company. But perhaps it’s time to start thinking of it as “Das Semantic Web Company.”

William Greenly is the Volkswagen Technical Lead for the auto vendor’s Volkswagen.co.uk online platform at integrated communications agency Tribal DDB. In that capacity he is taking the partnership the companies have had for more than four decades to a new level. His role there has encompassed managing data around Volkswagen’s products, its retailer and web site content, and its interfaces with social networks and many third-party back-end systems, including those germaine to the auto industry such as manufacturer consortiums.

Now, the focus is on using semantic web technology to drive a more elastic, flexible and streamlined digital world for “The Car” company.

The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”

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Just a few months ago Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, talked to The Semantic Web Blog about using RDFa to mark up the retailer’s product detail pages and more semantic things he’d like to do, including mashing up its online catalog data with some other data sources.

Well, in just the last week he’s been stoking the semantic data foundation – pushing Best Buy’s product visibility and discovery further along with the help of RDFa and pulling in some semantic data too, all geared to building up what he calls the company’s Insight Engine. And there’s more coming soon, as Myers’ has a personal agenda of stretching RDFa just about as far as he can in Best Buy product pages. “My goal is to make our web site as data- rich as possible while preserving the front-end user experience we have now,” he says. “It’s totally possible and I think we achieved that so far.”

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, we reported on the creation of a semantic data wrapper for the GoogleArt project. At the time, the wrapper only offered data for individual paintings and there was no good way to access the full data set. In this deeply technical guest post by the wrapper's creator, Christophe Guéret, he outlines how to grab the full data set.

If you do something interesting with this data, we would love to hear about it! Leave a comment below.]

Some weeks ago, a first version of a wrapper for the GoogleArt project from Google was put online (see also this blog post).
This wrapper, initially offering semantic data only for individual paintings, has now been extended to museums. The front page of GoogleArt is also available as RDF, providing a machine-readible list of museums. This index page makes it possible, and easy, to download an entire snapshot of the data set so let’s see how to do that.

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On Tuesday in London, the Google Art Project was announced. The project includes artworks from 17 of the world’s leading institutions including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection; the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC; London’s Tate Museum, and museums in Madrid, Moscow, Amsterdam and Florence, among others. The paintings are presented in High Definition, and the site has a wonderful User Interface for exploring the artworks.

Christophe Guéret noticed that there was something missing: machine-readable, semantic data. Read more

O’Reilly Media (http://oreilly.com/), the current name for the geek publishing giant founded by Tim O’Reilly, has finally joined the Semantic Web.  O’Reilly’s coining of the term "Web 2.0" and early misunderstandings of the Semantic Web stack lead some to think that he didn’t see much value in machine readable information.  That seems to have changed, at least in within <a href="http://labs.oreilly.com/">O’Reilly Labs</a>.

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We’ve put an OWL version of the Dublin Core out on our web site, feel free to use it as is or copy and modify it. 

http://ontologies.semanticarts.com/dublincore/dublincore.owl

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We’ve put an OWL version of the Dublin Core out on our website. Feel free to use it as is or copy and modify it.
http://ontologies.semanticarts.com/dublincore/dublincore.owl
In the act of doing this we recognized that there are so many different ways of doing this, there may never be a standard. A few quick notes on the design tradeoffs we made here:
First, it is initially tempting to have many of the tags in the Dublin Core be classes (Creator, Publisher, etc.). But as you reflect on the way they are used and intended to be used, they are really properties, of “document” or some generic class that covers the types of things intended to be covered by the Dublin Core (books, online articles, music and the like).
So even if “creator” is a property, you’d probably like to have a class at the other end of the property. Maybe you’d like to have the property be “hasCreator” and the target object be a member of class “Creator.” But that wno’t really work. Already the tag name is different, but there is a deeper problem. The recommended use is for Creators (and other people and organizations) to represent their names in the “LastName, FirstName” style. Of course this means that the names are strings, and that the property is a datatype property.
If our primary goal was Dublin Core compatibility, we would just make all the tags datatype properties, with a domain of document, and be pretty much done. If that’s what you want, just take the attached and strip out the rest.
For our purposes we were hoping for some future integration between the structured and unstructured world, and the all datatype property solution was limiting in this regard (there is very little node folding to be done in this style of design, for instance).
In many cases we would know the uri/urn of the entity in question (we would know an author’s identity, not just their name). We’d like to make it an object property, but in the end settled on this tradeoff: we’d make two subproperties of each of the dublin core properties where we would have identities (creator, contributor and publisher), one for their name and one a string representation of their id. As subproperties, each would then infer and show up as “creator” or “contributor.” We wanted to make the id version a subtype of an object property, but that just wasn’t going to happen. We intend to have a simple rule convert the string id to a uri when we need to integrate.
For several of the other properties, if there was a document to document relationship (basedOn, versionOf, partOf, etc.), we created an object property with Document as domain and range.
We used the Dublin Core guideline for sub tags with periods, but I have a feeling we’re going to regret that. I’ll let you know.

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