Earlier this week I spent an enjoyable hour on the phone, discussing the work done by a venerable world-class museum in making data about its collections available to a new audience of developers and app-builders. Much of our conversation revolved around consideration of obstacles and barriers, and the most intractable of those proved something of a surprise.

Reluctance amongst senior managers to let potentially valuable data walk out the door? Nope. In fact, not even close; managers pushed museum staff to adopt a more permissive license for metadata (CC0) than the one (CC-BY) they had been considering.

Reluctance amongst curators to let their carefully crafted metadata be abused and modified by non-professionals? Possibly a little bit, but apparently nothing the team couldn’t handle.

A bean-counter’s obsession with measuring every click, every query, every download, such that the whole project became bogged down in working out what to count and when (and, sadly, that really is the case elsewhere!)? Again, no. “The intention was to create a possibility” by releasing data. The museum didn’t know what adoption would be like, and sees experimentation and risk-taking as part of its role. Monitoring is light, and there’s no intention to change that.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 3 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

What’s the path from an XML based e-government metadata application to a linked data version? At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the road taken by the Dutch government will be described by Paul Hermans, lead architect of Belgian project Erfgoedplus.be, which uses RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects, people, place and time.

Some 1,000 individual organizations compose the Dutch government, each with their own websites. An effort to employ a search engine a few years ago to spider those different and separate web sites to have one single point of access didn’t work as anticipated. The next step to bring some order was to assign all the documents published on those sites a common kernel of metadata fields, which led to building an XML application to enable a structured approach. Linked Data entered the picture about a year and a half ago.

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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A recent article by Andreas Blumauer introduces SKOSsy, a web service that “generates SKOS based thesauri in German or in English for a domain you are interested in. Not any domain but nearly any: SKOSsy extracts data from DBpedia, so it can cover anything which is in DBpedia. Thus, SKOSsy works well whenever a first seed thesaurus should be generated for a certain organisation or project. If you load the automatically generated thesaurus into an editor like PoolParty Thesaurus Manager (PPT) you can start to enrich the knowledge model by additional concepts, relations and links to other LOD sources. But you don´t have to start in the open countryside with your thesaurus project.” Read more

It’s that spooky time of year again – in your neighborhood and on the Semantic Web, too. Put on your goblin getups, and see how some semantic webbers and related sites are getting Halloween treats into their mix:

 

• We’ll start with a response we got to a query we posed about how you might have some fun with Halloween-oriented SPARQL queries. From Bob DuCharme, solutions architect at TopQuadrant, comes a query to extract a SKOS taxonomy of horror movies from DBpedia.

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Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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If you missed the excellent live webcast introduction to SKOS by Bob DuCharme (of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL), the recorded webcast is now available.

You will probably find this webcast useful if: Read more

Date:	Thursday, October 6, 2011
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE

In August, we had the pleasure of hosting the excellent instructor, Bob DuCharme, as he walked us through an introduction to SPARQL: “SPARQL Queries, SPARQL Technology.” Next week, Bob will join us again, this time to introduce us to SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System standard.

Description:

You manage a taxonomy, thesaurus, or some other kind of controlled vocabulary using a proprietary tool or perhaps even by emailing around spreadsheets to each other. Read more

eBooks are cool, but they could get even cooler with EPUB3, the next version of the widely adopted distribution and interchange format for digital books (well, except for Amazon). The latest version of the standard could make it easier for publishers to more flexibly represent their offerings to digital book retailers, and add a lot of excitement to the eBook reading experience, too.

EPUB3 is based on HTML 5 and was proposed to include RDFa. RDFa is in question for eBook metadata now, however, though there is still the possibility to embed RDF/OWL within eBook content. (Membership comments on EPUB3 are due in by Aug. 22). EPUB 3 requires the same three metadata elements as EPUB 2, which are dc:identifier, dc:title, and dc:language, while also permitting many more. “We left it open to using something like RDFa so you can put in what you need to,” says Eric Freese, solutions architect at digital publishing solutions vendor Aptara. That could include, for example, using the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) XML metadata vocabulary for managing and aggregating publishing content, or ONIX metadata for representing and communicating book industry product information.

However the RDFa question fares, one thing that is increasingly clear to publishers that have done any looking at all into eBooks, Freese says, is that “it doesn’t take long before they get hit in the face with the metadata problem. And as more time goes by there are fewer and fewer publishers who haven’t thought about doing eBooks.”

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The government of Canada has released a new downloadable version of its Core Subject Thesaurus in SKOS/RDF format. According to Library and Archives Canada, “The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is a bilingual thesaurus consisting of terminology that represents all the fields covered in the information resources of the Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada is exploring the potential for linked data and the semantic web with LAC vocabularies, metadata and open content.” Read more