The W3C RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three new last call working drafts: RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. Ivan Herman reports, “Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents or in HTML. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice Web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.” Read more

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!

On Friday, January 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Nova Spivack.
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On his private website, Ivan Herman recently commented on the current status of RDFa 1.1. Herman stated, “There has been a flurry of activities around RDFa 1.1 in the past few months. Although a number of blogs and news items have been published on the changes, all those have become ‘officialized’ only the past few days with the publication of the latest drafts, as well as with the publication of RDFa 1.1 Lite. It may be worth looking back at the past few months to have a clearer idea on what happened.” Read more

This month, we present the twelfth Podcast episode in our monthly series of discussions with Semantic Web thought leaders from around the globe. In this episode, we reflect on the last year and make some predictions for 2012.

We also are making a request below for input from you, our audience, in the form of two poll questions. Please take a moment to let us know what you think! Read more

Ivan Herman announced on the W3C blog: “The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. This document defines the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. The term ‘Ontology’ is used in its broadest possible definition: a core vocabulary. The intent of this vocabulary is to bridge the different descriptions of media resources, and provide a core set of descriptive properties.” Read more

Ivan Herman recently posted a demonstration on the W3C blog of a new feature that he has added to the RDFa 1.1 Distiller. Herman writes, “Up to today, the possible serializations were RDF/XML, Turtle, and N Triples. Although not yet final, I decided to add a JSON-LD serialization, too, in spite of the fact that JSON-LD is not yet final either (it is under development by a W3C Community Group). However, adding this to the system it shows the potentials of this combination.” Read more

Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany]

 

The Semantic Web Death Match: Industry vs Academica vs Standards at ISWC this week consisted of 5 panelists and Jim Hendler as the moderator. Each panelist summarized their point of view in a short phrase:

• Martin Hepp (Don’t shoot the messenger: the Fall of Constantinople)
• Michael Hausenblas (Now we have the basement, let’s go for the floors and the roof!)
• Chris Welty (Standards aren’t bad, just misunderstood)
• Ivan Herman (Did We forget about the client-side web applications’ world?)
• Ian Horrocks (Maybe the Web is the wrong application…)

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The W3C’s Semantic Web Activity Lead, Ivan Herman, has provided a recap of the second RDF Face-to-Face (F2F) meeting: “Most of the two days’ meeting concentrated on ‘graph identification’, i.e., what is commonly called ‘named graphs’ by the community. This discussion at the F2F was the outcome of a long series of discussion on the group’s mailing list, started, essentially, right when the group began its work. There are many issues surrounding this loose notion of named graphs, including terminology, semantics, syntax; although the F2F meeting has not solved all the problems, significant advances were achieved.” Read more

On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

• Play the Podcast (1 hour)
• Subscribe to the Monthly Podcast
• See All Semantic Link Podcasts

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