A new article on R Bloggers explains how to get “up and running on the Semantic Web” using SPARQL with R in under five minutes. The article states, “We’ll use data at the Data.gov endpoint for this example. Data.gov has a wide array of public data available, making this example generalizable to many other datasets. One of the key challenges of querying a Semantic Web resource is knowing what data is accessible. Sometimes the best way to find this out is to run a simple query with no filters that returns only a few results or to directly view the RDF. Fortunately, information on the data available via Data.gov has been cataloged on a wiki hosted by Rensselaer. We’ll use Dataset 1187 for this example. It’s simple and has interesting data – the total number of wildfires and acres burned per year, 1960-2008.” 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

Bob DuCharme, the presenter of next week’s webcast SPARQL Queries, SPARQL Technology recently wrote a brief article showing how simple RDFa can be. DuCharme begins, “I got so tired of hearing people complain about how confusing RDFa is that while I was on hold during a recent phone call I threw together a demo of just how simple it can be. The document has the two basic kinds of triples: one with a literal for an object, with data typing thrown in for good measure, and one with a resource URI as its object.” Read more

The Linked Open Copac Archives Hub (LOCAH) Project recently announced “the release of http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk, the first Linked Data set produced by the LOCAH project. The team has been working hard since the beginning of the project on modelling the complex archival data and transforming it into RDF Linked Data. This is now available in a variety of forms via the data.archiveshub.ac.uk home page.” The announcement notes, “We’re working on a visualisation prototype that provides an example of how we link the Hub Data with other Linked Data sources on the Web using our enhanced dataset to provide a useful graphical resource for researchers.” Read more