SEMIC, the Semantic Interoperability Community recently published 10 Rules for Persistent URIs. The article states, “The attached report documents a survey performed by ISA Action 1.1 on Semantic Interoperability in order to explore good practices on the publication of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), both in terms of format and of their design rules and management. Read more

Phys.org recently shared an interesting ontology case study in the field of botany, Ontologies as Integrative Tools for Plant Science. The article states, “Botany is plagued by the same problem as the rest of science and society: our ability to generate data quickly and cheaply is surpassing our ability to access and analyze it. In this age of big data, scientists facing too much information rely on computers to search large data sets for patterns that are beyond the capability of humans to recognize—but computers can only interpret data based on the strict set of rules in their programming.”

The article continues, “A new article in this month’s American Journal of Botany by Ramona Walls (New York Botanical Garden) and colleagues describes how scientists build ontologies such as the Plant Ontology (PO) and how these tools can transform plant science by facilitating new ways of gathering and exploring data. Read more

The IEEE Intelligent Systems May-June Issue includes an article entitled Linked Open Government Data. The article was written by Li Ding of Qualcomm, Vassilios Peristeras of the European Commission, and Michael Hausenblas of the National University of Ireland, Galway. The abstract states, “Government data covers authoritative and valuable information about our society. Public access to government data, however, remains challenging largely due to the heterogeneity and complexity of the public information ecosystem which results in high costs for locating, decoding, inter-linking and reusing existing government data.” Read more

Joe McKendrick of ZDnet recently argued that Linked Data is the next frontier for service-oriented businesses. He turns to a paper in the Semantic Web Journal for support. McKendrick writes, “Data is the extremely valuable commodity that the business needs to manage, digest and share, but the challenge of data integration hasn’t been fully resolved by XML, Web services or service oriented architecture. The paper, co-authored by a team led by Philipp Frischmuth and Jakub Klímek and posted on the Semantic Web Journal site, observes that classic SOA implementations to date have focused on transaction processing, but organizations seeking to being together their disparate data silos need to move on to the next step: linked data.” Read more

A New Framework for Querying Semantic Networks, a paper that was presented at Museums and the Web 2012, is now available online. The paper was written by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H. Crete–Greece. The abstract states, “The upcoming large-scale metadata repositories, semantic networks of Resource Description Framework triples integrating large amounts of cultural–historical data, are not easily accessible to global query paradigms, such as ‘query by example’ or keyword search. ISO21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) is an adequate global schema for such systems, but querying individually hundreds of different kinds of properties leaves a huge recall gap compared to text retrieval, whereas a global restriction to ‘core metadata,’ such as Dublin Core, deprives the systems of any more advanced integration and reasoning capability.” Read more

Leigh Dodds has posted a paper regarding layered data and RDF. Dodds introduces the paper thus: “Two years ago I wrote a short paper about ‘layering’ data but for various reasons never got round to putting it online. The paper tried to capture some of my thinking at the time about the opportunities and approaches for publishing and aggregating data on the web. I’ve finally got around to uploading it and you can read it here. I’ve made a couple of minor tweaks in a few places but I think it stands up well, even given the recent pace of change around data publishing and re-use. I still think the abstraction that it describes is not only useful but necessary to take us forward on the next wave of data publishing.” Read more

Tim Davies recently pointed out two new open data publications. The first was a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics on open government. The second is a report:  ICT for or against development? An introduction to the ongoing case of Web 3 (PDF). The paper was written by Mike Powell, Tim Davies, and Keisha Candice Taylor. The full paper is available for download here. Read more

A new paper is available for purchase entitled Semantic Web meets Integrative Biology: A Survey. The paper was written by Huajun Chen, Tong Yu, and Jake Y. Chen. According to the abstract, “Integrative Biology (IB) uses experimental or computational quantitative technologies to characterize biological systems at the molecular, cellular, tissue and population levels. IB typically involves the integration of the data, knowledge and capabilities across disciplinary boundaries in order to solve complex problems.” Read more

Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford have published a paper entitled Six Provocations for Big Data. The pair presented the paper at Oxford Internet Institute’s symposium, A Decade in Internet Time. The abstract states, “The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, Facebook, Wikipedia, and every space where large groups of people leave digital traces and deposit data.” Read more

Juan F. Sequeda, Marcelo Arenas, and Daniel P. Miranker have written a new paper entitled Directly Mapping Relational Databases to RDF and OWL. According to the abstract, “Mapping relational databases to RDF is a fundamental problem for the development of the Semantic Web. We present a solution, inspired by draft methods defined by the W3C where relational databases are directly mapped to RDF and OWL. Given a relational database schema and its integrity constraints, this direct mapping produces an OWL ontology, which, provides the basis for generating RDF instances. The semantics of this mapping is defined using Datalog.” Read more