A recent interview by Kim Chandler McDonald with Ora Lassila takes a look at the current state and future prospects of the semantic web. The article notes, “A large part of Ora’s career has been focused on the Semantic Web as it applies to mobile and ubiquitous computing at the Nokia Research Center (NRC), where he, among many things, authored ‘Wilbur’, the NRC’s Semantic Web toolkit… Ora is one of the originators of the Semantic Web, having been working within the domain since 1996.  He is the co-author (with Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler) of the most cited paper in the field, The Semantic Web.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Katy Cowan recently reported that a new Open Data Institute is going to be established in London in order to “drive innovation and exploit the growth opportunities for the UK created by the government’s Open Data policy.” Cowan writes, “The government is to commit up to £10 million over five years to support the Open Data Institute (ODI), which will be co-directed by Professor Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The ODI will be developed by the Technology Strategy Board and the implementation plan for the Institute will be published by the Technology Strategy Board by April 2012.” Read more

Ten years (and change) since the publication of The Semantic Web article in Scientific American, co-author Jim Hendler says he is “very, very happy and optimistic about the state of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web.”

And, he notes, government has been an exciting partner in its progress.

Hendler, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, home of the Tetherless World Constellation, will provide evidence of that in his presentation at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. this month. TWC works on opening and linking government data using Semantic Web technologies, and Hendler also freely provides his expertise to the U.S. data.gov project, through which he’s in contact with many other governments’ open data projects. Those attending Hendler’s keynote at the conference will get a look at TWC’s new International Open Government Dataset Search (IOGDS) app based on metadata extracted from some 400,000 government datasets on catalog websites. These were converted to RDF Linked Data and then republished via TWC’s LOGD SPARQL endpoint. “That proves we can use metadata to help people find the right data when there is so much available,” Hender says, and yield better visualizations of it, too.

Some 25 countries currently are represented, inclusive of datasets from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and China. “What’s exciting to me is we see this happening all around the world,” Hendler says. “The extent to which the ecosystem is forming around this area is really surprising.” TWC features a few dozen demos here, which provide some insight into how much of a game-changer it is for government to couple open and Linked Data, providingthe ability to do things more quickly and in a more web-friendly way, and at lower costs. Hendler points to TWC’s creating infographic visualizations from several government datasets in hours, not months, and at a cost of pennies, not tens of thousands of dollars.

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Vuk Miličić, the author of Faviki, has written an article regarding the challenge of building a truly semantic web. Miličić writes, “The Semantic Web is often described as an extension of the current Web. The idea of what extending the Web should look like can be seen in Linked Data. In order to better understand the importance of Linked Data, one has to understand the context in which it emerged, i.e. the problem it has been trying to solve.” Read more

Underway at the W3C are some major Semantic Web efforts that can have a big impact on the enterprise.

One of these is about mapping relational databases to RDF. The RDB2RDF Working Group late last month issued a last call regarding the publication of its Direct Mapping and R2RML documents. As has been noted by Tim Berners-Lee, a big driving force for the Semantic Web has been the expression on the Web of the vast amounts of relational database information in a way that can be processed by machines. “We know that something like 80 or 90 percent of data published on the web comes from relational databases,” says Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web activity lead. “So it is important to make smooth the bridge between those two worlds, and this is what the working group was set up to do.”

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The recent MIT $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition included a new category this year: The Linked Data Prize. That $10,000 award was shared by three entrants, Convexic, whose algorithm matches job applicants with positions; Link Cycle, which has a collaborative online tool for improving environmental life-cycle analyses; and Upkast, which has created a virtual file sharing system.

Upkast, which was founded by MIT student David Jia, also took the lead in the category track for web/IT. The online platform, which is used by MIT’s own Media Lab, was inspired by Jia’s own experiences having to upload and download the same data across various services – Facebook, Google Docs, and so on. “That didn’t seem to make sense,” Jia says. Upkast takes care of that by making any sort of file system or data service into a standardized virtual file system, aggregating all users’ different web services and points of data under one roof.

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The Bilbao Web Summit, which starts today in Bilbao, Spain, will include a new award known as the DAMA Award. This year the award will be given to Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “recognition for his invention of the Web.” According to the release, “The ceremony will be held during the Cocktail Gala at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as part of the conclusion of the Web Summit. At that time, the awards committee will also announce the organization of the 2013 award.” Read more

A recent blog post comments on some of the best books available on the semantic web and linked data. Regarding tools and techniques, the writer suggested, “There are the classics such as Practical RDF by Powers and A Semantic Web Primer by Antoniou and van Harmelen. There are introductory books such as Semantic Web For Dummies by Pollock. These are all good foundational books which are recommended, but they often don’t get to the essence of the Semantic Web and especially not Linked Data.” Read more

A new infographic depicts the evolution of web design over the last twenty years. The description states, “Can you believe that the first published website is already 20 years old? Web design has come a long way since the first website was published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. This infographic is a peek at the evolutionary tale of web design, which is ironically still in its infant stages. Enjoy the infographic below and let your imagination wander. You might find yourself asking, ‘Where will web design be in the next 20 years?’”

See a full size version of the infographic here.

Image: Courtesy KissMetrics.com