Ivan Herman of the W3C reports, “W3C published the Second Edition of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). RIF was developed through a joint effort of members of the Business Rules, Semantic Web, and Logic Programming communities. It allows rules systems to be connected together for highly-structured knowledge to be accurately exchanged as explained in RIF Use Cases and Requirements. The Second Edition includes editorial improvements and a number of small corrections to the original specification, along with a new RIF Primer.” Read more

Emergent analytics company Revelytix has released early access versions of Spinner and Rex for free evaluation. According to a statement by Revelytix, “Enterprise information management needs radical improvement: it hasn’t really changed much since the relational database was invented. Spinner enables a true, standards-based data federation capability throughout and beyond the enterprise. Spinner employs a new information modeling and description technology, OWL and RDF, from the W3C standards organization. It is now possible to combine enterprise knowledge with enterprise data to enable Emergent Analytics.” Read more

The TopQuadrant blog recently compared Spin with RIF. According to the post, “Since SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) aka SPARQL Rules became W3C
member submission,we find ourselves responding to the growing interest to it. With this, a question some may ask is how SPIN is different from or similar to RIF – W3C’s standard for rules interchange. While I have heard this asked a couple of times, I was pleasantly surprised that it was is not a very common question. Pleasantly, because a certain level of confusion is to be expected about new things and, both, SPIN and RIF are relatively new. Read more

 An informal raise-your-hand survey of attendees at the SemTech conference in San Francisco this week revealed that a good number of attendees were here for the first time. And one of the early morning tutorials Monday provided a perfect opportunity for many of them to explore the Semantic Web in greater depth, with the W3C’s Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman Introduction to the Semantic Web session.

During the session Herman explained the various components of the Semantic Web and how they fit together. He started with defining RDF (Resource Description Framework) as the basis for it all, serving as a general model for the triples – the subject-property-object sets — forming a directed, labeled graph, where labels are identified by URIs (Uniform Resource Indicators). And working from there all the way through to OWL and RIF (Rule Interchange Format).

Some highlights of the journey follow:

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Maryland-based semantic technology company Revelytix will be presenting a number of their most promising products at the Semantic Technology Conference in a few weeks. One of their sessions will focus on Interactive Visualization Tools for Ontologies: “They say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and it is Revelytix’s belief that the lack of meaningful visual representations of ontologies makes the whole idea of using them harder for the masses to adopt. In our efforts to create a robust interactive ontology visualization tool we have met many challenges… We will demonstrate our current visualization tool and how we have dealt with these issues.” Read more

What do the Open Travel Association, the Filoli historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Ontology Platform Special Interest Group (PSIG) at the Object Management Group all have in common? Ontologies, of course!

Starting at the most obvious point, the Ontology PSIG developed the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), and at the upcoming SemTech conference, Elisa Kendall, CEO of Sandpiper Software, co -editor of ODM and co-chair of the Ontology PSIG, will discuss some of the latest work underway there. Of which, she tells The Semantic Web Blog, there is “a ton.”

Among the efforts underway are making ODM current with W3C specs including support for OWL 2 (which should be available towards year’s end), and others that depend to some degree on the standard and building on that baseline.

These include vertical industry efforts such as Common Terminology Services (CTS) 2 from the health care sector’s HL7 standardization body. Kendall says this builds on the first version of ODM, with the focus on using ontologies and depending on semantics for providing the terminology, translation and cross-correlation of the maze of hospital and insurance codes to enable interchange of this data among parties.

The CTS2 effort has been generalized so that it can support terminology services for other verticals as well, which the OMG Ontology PSIG group hopes will make it more broadly useful. “We’ll have to see how that plays out in practice, since it’s only just being published this summer,” Kendall says.

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The staffing firm Brooksource is looking for a Semantic Developer in Indianapolis, IN. Qualifications for this position include experience with TopBraid; excellent experience in object-oriented programming in SPARQL, XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema, and/or OWL. The position also calls for experience with Rule Interchange Format (RIF). This is a contract position.

Image: Courtesy Brooksource