Perhaps one of the most anticipated panels at next week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco is the Wednesday morning session on Schema.org. Since the announcement of Schema.org just prior to last year’s SemTech Business Conference on the west coast, using the Schema.org shared vocabularies along with the microdata format to mark up web pages has been much debated, and created questions in the minds of webmasters and web search marketers along the lines of, “Which way should we go? Microdata or RDFa?”

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How can you not be intrigued by a project whose tag line is, “an elevator for your data.” DataLift, funded by France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherchenatl, is that project, and it’s developing a platform for publishing structured data as Linked Data. That platform is the elevator going up, and it’s due to have its first formal release by year’s end, says Francois Scharffe, scientific director at DataLift and also Associate professor at the Université de Montpellier 2 and researcher at LIRMM.

To bring your data – perhaps it’s information in a relational database or CSV files, for instance – up to the top floor, so to speak, requires making four stops, he explains. The first one is to select the ontologies for publishing the data.  “We aim to provide every solution to either give you the right ontology or set of ontologies and terms, or to tell you that you need to extend an ontology for that particular data,” he says.

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The results of the survey “Do controlled vocabularies matter?” are in. We covered some preliminary findings of the survey a few weeks back, and now the complete
findings are available for download here. An article on the findings states, “Over 150 participants from 27 countries draw a picture of the current and future usage
behaviour in the realm of controlled vocabularies.”

One of the survey questions was, “Do you thing enterprises and other organizations can significantly benefit from using Linked Data?” Read more

Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, acknowledged that he had to make some last-minute alterations to the presentation he gave yesterday at SemTech on the practical business uses of RDFa for search engines and beyond. They were required in light of the schema.org announcement that came at the end of last week. Myers worked the new standard for creating and supporting a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in microdata into a slide that showed how the Semantic Web can bring equilibrium to the pendulum that tends to swing between the shiny-ball stuff of the web that’s tailored for human consumption and the back-end keyword- and metadata-stuffing that’s done for the benefits of machine-reading.

But RDFa still takes top billing.

schema.org, Myers told the audience, is “search-centric and what I believe what the Semantic Web really entails is knowledge and insight,” he said.

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The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) recently released its agreement with the Friend of a Friend Project (FOAF). According to the summary, “This agreement outlines specific measures to be undertaken in cooperation between DCMI and the FOAF Project — measures aimed primarily at reinforcing the long-term viability of the FOAF Vocabulary by addressing the risks inherent with having a single point of failure. The two organizations also see this cooperation as an opportunity for better integrating their vocabularies with alignments — mutually declared mappings between semantically overlapping terms — and for promoting the documentation of best-practice usage patterns in which the two vocabularies are used in combination.” Read more

A recent article from Inforbix comments on a quote from Lynda Moulton, writer of Semantic Software Technologies. Moulton said, “Besides baked-in intelligence for answering human questions using natural language processing (NLP) to search, an answer-platform like Watson requires tons of data. Also, data must be assembled in conceptually and contextually relevant databases for good answers to occur. When documents and other forms of electronic content are fed to a knowledgebase for semantic retrieval, finely crafted metadata (data describing the content) and excellent vocabulary control add enormous value. These two content enhancers, metadata and controlled vocabularies, can transform good search into excellent search.” Read more

In tech news, SKOS has been altered to interoperate with OWL 2. Up until now the two vocabularies haven’t been able to “play together nicely,” but thanks to a few simple tweaks to SKOS, they are now able to operate together smoothly.

According to the article, “In the semantic Web, arguably SKOS is the right vocabulary for representing simple knowledge structures, and OWL 2 is the right language for asserting axioms and ontological relationships. In the early days we chose a reliance on SKOS for the UMBEL reference concept ontology, because of UMBEL’s natural role as a knowledge structure.” Read more