The Library of Congress is working on a bibliographic framework for the digital age. According to the article, “The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model.  The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector.  Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.” Read more

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 !

The W3C’s Web Services Resource Access Working Group has called for the implementation of seven new web service specifications. According to a brief release, the group “invites implementation of seven Candidate Recommendations for Web Services: Enumeration (WS-Enumeration), Event Descriptions (WS-EventDescriptions), Eventing (WS-Eventing), Fragment (WS-Fragment), Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange), SOAP Assertions (WS-SOAPAssertions), and Transfer (WS-Transfer).” Read more

The RDF2 Working Group met face-to-face in Amsterdam last week, and Guus Schreiber (who serves as co-chair of the group with David Wood) has just posted about some of the highlights. Schreiber said, “The results of the [Working Group] are not likely to shake the Web world, but will hopefully contribute significantly to enhanced and widespread effective use of Semantic Web technology.”

Sandro Hawke, also in attendance at the Working Group, wrote down his thoughts in a blog post: “18 months ago, when Ivan Herman and I began to plan a new RDF Working Group, I posted my RDF 2 Wishlist. Some people complained that the Semantic Web was not ready for anything different; it was still getting used to RDF 1. I clarified that ‘RDF 2’ would be backward compatible and not break existing systems, just like ‘HTML 5’ isn’t breaking the existing Web. Still, some people preferred the term ‘RDF 1.1’.” Read more

The W3C RDFa Working Group “has published Last Call Working Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1.” The release states, “The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience.” Read more

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published updated drafts of the following SPARQL 1.1 documents.

• SPARQL 1.1 Query adds support for aggregates, subqueries, projected expressions, and negation to the SPARQL query language.
• SPARQL 1.1 Update defines an update language for RDF graphs.
• SPARQL 1.1 Service Description defines a vocabulary and discovery mechanism for describing the capabilities of a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs describes the use of the HTTP protocol for managing named RDF graphs on an HTTP server.
• SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes defines conditions under which SPARQL queries can be used with entailment regimes such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.

The current plans of the Working Group are to publish the so called “Last Call” Working Draft around the end of the year.

As has been reported earlier, W3C held an “RDF Next Steps” workshop in June 2010 and has published the Report of the Workshop in early July. That workshop discussed the possibility of an RDF Working Group. The overall goal would be to extend RDF to include some of the features that the community has identified as both desirable and important for interoperability based on experience with the 2004 version of the standard, but without having a negative effect on existing deployment efforts.

The Workshop has listed a number of work items that might be of interest for such a Working Group, and has also conducted an informal poll as for the relative priority of those items (with links to the detailed description of the items themselves). As a next step, a public questionnaire has been created listing, essentially, those items (although some of them have been regrouped for a better readability). The goal of the questionnaire is to poll the Web community at large so that the upcoming charter would reflect the real needs for the years to come.

So… if you are interested in the evolution of RDF, here is the chance to make your opinion heard. All the results of the questionnaire will be public. The questionnaire will stay open until the 13th of September.

The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Proposed Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with Semantic Web technologies.

Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

• The RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD) is designed for the kinds of rules used in modern Business Rule Management systems.
• The RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) is a foundation for Logic Programming, classical logic, and related formalisms.
• The RIF Core Dialect is the common subset of PRD and BLD, useful when having a ubiquitous platform is paramount.

The other drafts:

• RIF Datatypes and Builtins (DTB) specifies the datatypes and standard operations (modeled on XPath Functions) available in all RIF dialects
• RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies how RIF works with RDF, RDFS, OWL 1, and OWL 2.
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD) provides a mechanism for specifying extended dialects, beyond BLD, when more expressive power is required.

The group has also published a new version of RIF Test Cases, and three other Working Drafts: RIF Overview, RIF Combination with XML data and OWL 2 RL in RIF.

RIF implementation information is available. Review comments are welcome until 8 June.

During the implementation phase of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF), the Working Group discovered a problem with the design of the Production Rules Dialect. This problem is addressed with a new Last Call Working Draft that changes the way actions are handled to more closely match existing production rule engines. Please send comments and RIF implementation reports to public-rif-comments@w3.org.

W3C announces the new RDB2RDF Working Group, whose mission is to standardize a language for mapping relational data and relational database schemas into RDF and OWL, tentatively called the RDB2RDF Mapping Language, R2RML. From the beginning of the deployment of the Semantic Web there has been increasing interest in mapping relational data to the Semantic Web. This is to allow relational data to be combined with other data on the Web, to link semantics directly to relational data and to aid in enterprise data integration. The creation of this Working Group follows the work of a previous W3C Incubator Group in this area. Read the RDB2RDF Working Group Charter

The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published a W3C Group Note of Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Test Suite. This document presents test cases for the POWDER technology, which helps to build a Web of trust and make it possible to discover relevant, quality content more efficiently. The tests facilitate and exemplify the creation of POWDER documents of varying complexity and provide a means to assert the conformance of software applications designed to handle POWDER documents.