The Common Crawl Foundation is on the verge of adding to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Data Set of openly and freely accessible web crawl data. It was back in January that Common Crawl announced the debut of its corpus on AWS (see our story here). Now, a billion new web sites are in the bucket, according to Common Crawl director Lisa Green, adding to the 5 billion web pages already there.

“When are you going to have new data is one of most frequent questions we get,” she says. The answer is that processing is underway now, and she hopes they’ll be ready to go this week.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 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 !

Semantic Web Community: I’m disappointed in us!  Or at least in our group marketing prowess.  We have been failing to capitalize on two major trends that everyone has been talking about and that are directly addressable by Semantic Web technologies!  For shame.

I’m talking of course about Big Data and NoSQL.  Given that I’ve already given my take on how Semantic Web technology can help with the Big Data problem on SemanticWeb.com, this time around I’ll tackle NoSQL and the Semantic Web.

After all, we gave up SQL more than a decade ago.  We should be part of the discussion.  Heck, even the XQuery guys got in on the action early!

Check out this Google Trends diagram.

NoSQL came out of nowhere in 2009, and now dominates much of the database conversation on the web.  Document stores like MongoDB and CouchDB, distributed, key-value stores such as Riak and Cassandra, and other weird stores like Hadoop-as-database (never understood that usage myself) now dominate the conversation as the alternative to traditional, SQL databases.

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If you missed last week’s excellent introduction to SPARQL by Bob DuCharme of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this presentation, Bob shows how to create and run SPARQL queries. He also talks about the role that the query language can play in application development. Lastly, he looks at the range of uses people are finding for SPARQL above and beyond querying of RDF data, such as querying relational data, defining rules to enhance data quality, and more…

Watch the webcast here:

http://mediabistro.adobeconnect.com/p8mwns7kdgx/

There were some questions we did not get to during the hour, and Bob has been kind enough to answer these offline.

BONUS Q&A with Bob DuCharme:

Q: Can sparql engines integrate reasoners and reason over the data on the fly? Read more

Microsoft is looking for a Software Development Engineer to join their SQL Server Engine Team in Redmond, WA. According to the post, “Extracting semantics and other forms of data inference at enterprise and web scale and making it easily searchable is really where the game is at today. Microsoft is locking horns with the competition and making big bets to win this challenge. We are building a new Database Search and Semantics data extraction and machine learning team inside of SQL Server (a $3.5 bil. business) with the larger vision of creating a new niche for SQL Server ‘beyond relational’ and extending out to Data Warehousing, in order to add more value to our enterprise product offerings.” Read more

[Editor's Note: With the San Francisco-based Semantic Technology Conference just two weeks away, we are going to feature a few of the the new and important products to be discussed at the conference. We will focus on a few of the products and tools that will be featured at the event. The full conference program is available here.]

At SemTech, representatives from Oracle will demonstrate the semantic aspects of Oracle database in two sessions:

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The University of Iowa Libraries is looking for a Web Application Developer in Iowa City: “The Web Application Developer provides application development and support for central library systems, including some commercial and several locally developed solutions. The incumbent will provide programming support to develop web 2.0 semantic Web and other emerging Web technologies and assist with integrating them into software systems. The position is in the Applications and Web Services Unit of the Library Information Technology Department and reports to the Unit Head.” Read more

Date: September 15, 2010, 11:00AM (1 hour)
Register: View the recorded webcast
Q&A: Q & A – Callimachus: Semantic Web Apps Made Easy

RDFa makes it easy for Web publishers to expose data on the Web, but RDFa can also make it easy to develop Web data applications. Watch how easy it is to replace complex data schemas and their SQL queries with simple RDFa attributes in your HTML markup! In this webcast, James Leigh, a lead developer (with David Wood) on the Callimachus Project, will show us how a Web developer can create semantically-enabled Web applications with a minimal knowledge of the internals of the Semantic Web and SQL. For further details, see Callimachus Project at http://www.callimachusproject.org. SUPPORTING MATERIAL This webcast walks you through some of the sample applications with Callimachus. To find out more about these sample applications and to download them, visit: http://code.google.com/p/callimachus/wiki/SampleApplicationInstructions Callimachus uses the Turtle syntax for its configuration files. The Turtle syntax is explained here:  http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/ RDFa is used in the template language of Callimachus. An introduction to RDFa (the data format) can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ During this webcast some browser extensions are used, they can be downloaded here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mgekankhbggjkjpcbhacjgflbacnpljm?hl=en https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/187590/

Presenters:

James Leigh
Independent Software Consultant
James Leigh is an independent Software Consultant based in Toronto. James is a co-creator of Callimachus and is involved in other public semantic Web projects, such as the PURL server and Sesame store. James has been building web applications for ten years with emphasis on performance and technology integration. His experience modelling business problems and concepts in software has enabled his clients to rapidly move from concepts to prototypes to production systems.

In order for the Semantic Web to become a reality and success, there needs to be data on the web published as Linked Data. However, data on the web is not a new thing. People have been publishing raw data for a long time as XML, CSV or even spreadsheets. Data can also be accessed through APIs.  But where does most of the data on the web come from? Relational Databases!

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XML Keyword Search is still a popular academic subject. It has not reached or been recognized by XML and Internet commercial products yet. The concepts involved are also very important to the semantic web. The semantics industry today with its work on higher level semantics like ontologies and taxonomies has overlooked the importance of utilizing the semantics of hierarchical structured data like XML. When working with hierarchically structured data, the first level of handling semantic understanding must be recognizing the hierarchical structure and its (lower level) hierarchical semantics. This is then used to eliminate false keyword search results that can show up as matches in hierarchical structures; otherwise they will go undetected to the higher level semantic processing which will also not detect them since they are not concerned with the structure of the data. This will cause unmeaningful results to be returned. 

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Executive Summary

Today the data structure transformation terminology of Restructuring and Reshaping are used interchangeably for XML structure transformation processes. There are two basic types of XML hierarchical data structure transformations that need to be distinguished because they are different in meaning, results, and use. These are restructuring controlled by existing relationships in the data, and reshaping controlled by the semantics of the current data structure. Restructuring is performed by using new and unused relationships to restructure the data. On the other hand, reshaping uses the semantics of the current structure to mold the structure into any other shape without requiring or relying on any data relationships in the data. The processing follows correct hierarchical semantics principles to derive correct hierarchical results.

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