Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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One of the queries that often comes up at our Semantic Answers site is about how to get started actually working with Linked Data. Perhaps s3space can be of some help.

The brainchild of Amit Krishna Joshi, a PhD student in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Wright State University, where he does research at the Kno.e.sis Center, s3space is billed as a social lab for querying Linked Data. While the site isn’t for complete Linked Data neophytes – users do need to know something about RDF and how to write a basic SPARQL query and test it – s3space takes care of implementing and consuming data-set web services for querying SPARQL endpoints. It uses the Google App Engine at the back end to scale.

“With Linked Data, many people are trying to push more data onto the web. There is more structured data for researchers, for students, and for developers, but the basic question is how do you get at the data,” Joshi says. “To get at the data you have to write a query. And with this we are educating people to write a better query,” because they can repurpose queries that already are posted.

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