Ten years (and change) since the publication of The Semantic Web article in Scientific American, co-author Jim Hendler says he is “very, very happy and optimistic about the state of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web.”

And, he notes, government has been an exciting partner in its progress.

Hendler, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, home of the Tetherless World Constellation, will provide evidence of that in his presentation at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. this month. TWC works on opening and linking government data using Semantic Web technologies, and Hendler also freely provides his expertise to the U.S. data.gov project, through which he’s in contact with many other governments’ open data projects. Those attending Hendler’s keynote at the conference will get a look at TWC’s new International Open Government Dataset Search (IOGDS) app based on metadata extracted from some 400,000 government datasets on catalog websites. These were converted to RDF Linked Data and then republished via TWC’s LOGD SPARQL endpoint. “That proves we can use metadata to help people find the right data when there is so much available,” Hender says, and yield better visualizations of it, too.

Some 25 countries currently are represented, inclusive of datasets from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and China. “What’s exciting to me is we see this happening all around the world,” Hendler says. “The extent to which the ecosystem is forming around this area is really surprising.” TWC features a few dozen demos here, which provide some insight into how much of a game-changer it is for government to couple open and Linked Data, providingthe ability to do things more quickly and in a more web-friendly way, and at lower costs. Hendler points to TWC’s creating infographic visualizations from several government datasets in hours, not months, and at a cost of pennies, not tens of thousands of dollars.

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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!

[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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At I-Semantics, the 7^th International Conference on Semantic Systems held in Austria in mid-September, winning notices were given to some interesting semantic web projects.

One of them, DBpedia Spotlight, which annotates mentions of DBpedia resources in text to link unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud and which the Semantic Web Blog covered here, won the Best Paper Award. The open government data triplification track award went to John Erickson, Yongmei Shi, Li Ding, Eric Rozell, Jin Zheng and Professor Jim Hendler for“TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog“, covered here.

And the open data triplification track award went to Daniel Garijo, Boris Villazón and Oscar Corcho for the contribution, “A Provenance-Aware Linked Data Application for Trip Management and Organization. (Corcho also has been involved in Fortunata, a tool for helping developers and graphic designers that aren’t well-versed in semantic web technologies create Internet applications that use and generate semantic data, covered here.) The Semantic Web Blog wanted to catch up our readers on this winning trip-management entry, as well, and engaged in an email conversation with the developers to get better acquainted with the application entitled El Viajero, for exploiting, managing and organizing Linked Data in the domain of news and blogs about travelling.

A Web n+1 project, it integrates content from newspapers and digital platforms belonging to the Prisa Digital Group in the domain of news and blogs about travel. Uploaded a couple of months ago to the CKAN open source data software portal, the dataset is available on the Linked Open Data Cloud. The current number of triples is 9,462,350, but it goes up every month or two, when the developers update the content with new guides.

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The premise of Ad.ly is to be the Twitter advertising network that matches celebrities with brands. The goal is to drive audience click-through to those brand destinations thanks to the conversations carried on by the stars with their followers. So far it’s racked up some 1,000 celebrities, about 150 brands, and 24,000 celebrity-delivered tweets around brand engagements  – tweets that can generate a lot of interest. As head of engineering Chris Testa explained at SemTech this week, a top celebrity like Kim Kardashian can get some 15,000 clicks on a tweet, vs. about 400 on average for a NY Times or Wall Street Journal tweet. For a brand to really talk to people, he says, “it’s good to have a Kim Kardashian tweet, ‘This is what I am into,’ vs. having an ad in the NY Times.”

Interview with Ad.ly’s Chris Testa:

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There’s still no official word on how much peril open government data initiatives such as Data.gov may be in. And perhaps to many Americans, the hand-wringing they’ve heard about funding cuts in this area seem trivial when the country is looking at the U.S. public debt nearing its statutory ceiling of about $14.3 trillion. After all, what’s the real applicability of structured government data sets – and projects that translate that data into RDF, hook it up to the Linked Data cloud, and build apps and demos off it – to their lives?

More than they know.  Open data matters to individuals in their role as citizens, taxpayers, and as community members — not to mention potentially as innovators, too — says one of the Semantic Web’s founding fathers, James Hendler, the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There, at the Tetherless World Constellation, he is a leader of the Data-gov Wiki project that uses semantic web technologies to investigate open government data sets. (There are six other sites in the open data government initiative besides data.gov, including USASpending.gov and paymentaccuracy.gov.)

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This week of course saw the winners of the Elsevier 2010 Semantic Web Challenge revealed. Among the distinguishing features of the winners: The marriage of meaty semantic web technology and accessible user interfaces.

In the past entries might veer to the cool, funky and flashy on the surface, but a bit weak in the supporting infrastructure, or to some very compelling technical stuff that didn’t have a lot of interface appeal to the end user. But that wasn’t so much the case this time around, says Diana Maynard, one of this year’s co-chairs and a research associate in the computer science department at the University of Sheffield, where she focuses on NLP.

“People are starting to combine the two,” she says – good looks and good legs, so to speak.

That matters if semantic web technologies are to continue making headway outside the research communities and into some real practical applications. “You have to make the UI appealing to the outside user, especially with the take-up of semantic web technologies that we are starting to see in the real world,” Maynard says. “It’s important that these applications are not just research but things you can use in real life.” (The Semantic Web Blog recently looked at the UI issue in some depth here.)

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Personally, I believe that the Semantic Web will become mainstream in the next few years (I actually have a bet on this with some college friends). I know that this is a strong statement, but I am confident that it will happen. Mainstream is defined in Wikipedia as “the common current of thought of the majority.” Furthermore it states that something is mainstream if it “is available to the general public” and it “has ties to corporate or commercial entities.” However, how do you evaluate if something is on the verge of becoming mainstream? I propose the following metric:  inclusion at the South by South West (SXSW) Conference!

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So even though we’ve had the site open for a few days (testing, tweaking, etc) let this be my offical "welcome" to the new Semantic Universe site.  I’m delighted you’ve stopped by to take a look and I hope we can exceed your expectations while you’re here.

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Date: October 16, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

What is the Semantic Web and how does it relate to Web 3.0? What is Linked Data? What about enterprise applications? Who is using Semantic Web technologies, for what purposes and why? In this first installment of our Free Webcast series, Jim Hendler and Dean Allemang, leaders in the field of Semantic Technologies and co-authors of the recent book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”, take us on our first steps into the world of the Semantic Web.

Presenters:

James Hendler
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Assistant Dean for IT. Jim is former Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-director of the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the University of Maryland, and is widely recognized as one of the earliest visionaries of the Semantic Web.

Dean Allemang
TopQuadrant
Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant’s successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for four years. Dean has completed a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology. Prior to joining TopQuadrant, Dr. Allemang was the Vice-President of Customer Applications at Synquiry Technologies, were he filed two patents on the application of graph matching algorithms to the problems of semantic information interchange.

Date: November 5, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

In the second installment of our Free Webcast series, Jim Hendler and Dean Allemang, leaders in the field of Semantic Technologies and co-authors of the recent book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”, will walk us through the basic language components of the Semantic Web.

Presenters:

James Hendler
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Assistant Dean for IT. Jim is former Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-director of the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the University of Maryland, and is widely recognized as one of the earliest visionaries of the Semantic Web.

Dean Allemang
TopQuadrant
Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant’s successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for four years. Dean has completed a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology. Prior to joining TopQuadrant, Dr. Allemang was the Vice-President of Customer Applications at Synquiry Technologies, were he filed two patents on the application of graph matching algorithms to the problems of semantic information interchange.