Benjamin J. Balter recently opined that WordPress needs to start better expressing content in a machine readable format. Balter begins with an explanation of REST: “The idea is simple: a URL should uniquely identify the underlying data it represents. If I have a URL, I shouldn’t need anything else to view or otherwise manipulate the information behind it. WordPress, for the most part, does this well. Each post is given a unique permalink (e.g., 2012-12-15-why-wordpress…) that always points to that post. The problem is, however, in WordPress’s sense, it points to the display of that content, not the content itself. Read more

Wikimeta, the semantic tagging and annotation architecture for incorporating semantic knowledge within documents, websites, content management systems, blogs and applications, this month is incorporating itself as a company called Wikimeta Technologies.  Wikimeta, which has a heritage linked with the NLGbAse project, last year was provided as its own web service.

Dr. Eric Charton, Ph.D, MSc at École Polytechnique de Montréal, is project leader and author of the Wikimeta code. The NLGbAse project was conducted by Charton at the University of Avignon as part of his Ph.D. Thesis.  The Semantic Web Blog recently hosted an email discussion with him to learn more about the Wikimeta architecture and its evolution.

The Semantic Web Blog: Tell us about the NLGBase project and Wikimeta’s relationship to it.

Charton: NLGbAse is an ontology extracted from Wikipedia. It is used in Wikimeta as a resource for semantic disambiguation. For each Wikipedia document (aka Semantic Concept), NLGbAse provides various ways of word-writing (for example, “General Motors” can be written “GM Company”, “GM”, “General Motors Corp” and so on), used for detection.

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Last week, the Second Linked Data Meetup London was held at the University of London Union. There were several compelling presentations discussed on Twitter  including the BBC’s use of Linked Data for their Wildlife Finder app. One of the many promising topics to emerge from the day was the introduction of a new Linked Data API. While there have been other Linked Data APIs (Pubby and irON), this API has the more narrow goal of lowering the bar for non-SemWeb developers to access these rich data collections. It is intended as a simple RESTful layer that returns JSON representations of RDF collections backed by a SPARQL endpoint. The API was primarily developed by Dave Reynolds, Jeni Tennison and Leigh Dodds. At the "How the Web of Data Will Be Won" talk by Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan, they emphasized that extending their successes on exposing government data in a linked fashion will require a focus on usability to attract new developers.

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