From Web4WeB - Portal on Semantic web Technologies

Web4WeB Semantic Web Watch

RDB2RDF Working Group

September 16, 2009

The mission of the RDB2RDF Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to standardize a language for mapping relational data and relational database schemas into RDF and OWL, tentatively called the RDB2RDF Mapping Language, R2RML.

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Ontoprise has become a Microsoft Certified Partner

September 15, 2009

After last year’s strategic partnership between Microsoft and ontoprise (see press release from 05.09.2008) becoming a Microsoft Certified Partner was the next logical step for ontoprise. To become a Certified ISV partner ontoprise staff have had to prove their level of expertise and selected customer installations have been evaluated in detail.

The partnership with Microsoft offers ontoprise information on the latest technologies, development tools and best practices, and also provides a comprehensive support service. ontoprise customers will see benefits in two main ways. ontoprise semantic solutions can now be easily integrated into already existing Microsoft installations, which offers a higher level investment protection. On the other hand this partnership assures actuality, quality and continuity of ontoprise range of products and solutions.

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SKOS become W3C Recommendation

August 18, 2009

Many knowledge organization systems, such as thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes and subject heading systems, share a similar structure, and are used in similar applications. SKOS captures much of this similarity and makes it explicit, to enable data and technology sharing across diverse applications.

The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a lightweight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL).

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OntoBroker 5.3

July 29, 2009

The new OntoBroker 5.3 is the first SemanticWeb infrastructure which supports the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). RIF is a recommendation proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for exchanging ontologies and rules between SemanticWeb applications. With this development ontoprise expands its technology leadership and offers the world's only infrastructure which fully supports the recommendations of the W3C for semantic technologies.

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Ontoprise Semantic MediaWiki 1.4.4

July 29, 2009

Semantic MediaWiki+ (SMW+) is an open-source semantic wiki, targeted for use in commercial and corporate environments, allowing you to better manage and retrieve wiki contents, compared to conventional enterprise wikis. SMW+ provides an intuitive means for end-users to collaboratively create, organise and retrieve knowledge in your wiki. In this case knowledge is your semantically enriched wiki contents, which can be processed and interpreted by the wiki system and other ontology infrastructures. As a consequence, users are not restricted to a simple key word search for knowledge retrieval, but they are able to effectively query and evaluate the wiki’s knowledge base, giving them precisely the information they need. The contained semantics make the wiki context-aware: Thus, a query e.g. for wiki pages tagged with “event”, also yields pages only tagged with “conference”, because the wiki understands that every conference is an event.

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SPIN Modeling Vocabulary 1.0.1

July 24, 2009

The SPIN Modeling Vocabulary is a light-weight collection of RDF properties and classes to support the use of SPARQL to specify rules and logical constraints. Based on an RDF representation of SPARQL queries, SPIN defines three class description properties: spin:constraint can be used to define conditions that all members of a class must fulfill. spin:rule can be used to specify inference rules using SPARQL CONSTRUCTs. spin:constructor can be used to initialize new instances with default values. In addition to these class description properties, SPIN provides a powerful meta-modeling capability that can be used to build your own modeling language and SPARQL extensions. These meta-modeling features provide the ability to encapsulate reusable SPARQL queries into templates, and to derive new SPARQL functions from other SPARQL queries and functions.

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SPARQL New Features and Rationale

July 2, 2009

SPARQL is a query language for RDF data on the Semantic Web with formally defined meaning. This document is a simple introduction to the new features of the language, including an explanation of its differences with respect to the previous SPARQL Query Language Recommendation [SPARQL/Query 1.0]. It also presents the requirements that have motivated the design of the main new features, and their rationale from a theoretical and implementation perspective.

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OWL 2 Web Ontology Language

June 11, 2009

The OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, informally OWL 2, is an ontology language for the Semantic Web with formally defined meaning. OWL 2 ontologies provide classes, properties, individuals, and data values and are stored as Semantic Web documents. OWL 2 ontologies can be used along with information written in RDF, and OWL 2 ontologies themselves are primarily exchanged as RDF documents. The OWL 2 Document Overview describes the overall state of OWL 2, and should be read before other OWL 2 documents.

This document provides a specification of several profiles of OWL 2 (OWL 2 EL, OWL 2 QL, OWL 2 RL) which can be more simply and/or efficiently implemented. In logic, profiles are often called fragments. Most profiles are defined by placing restrictions on the structure of OWL 2 ontologies. These restrictions have been specified by modifying the productions of the functional-style syntax.

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TopBraid Suite 3.0 released

May 1, 2009

Roughly nine months after our previous official TopBraid Composer release, we have today released TopBraid Suite 3.0! This is not just another Composer version, but a significant milestone for TopQuadrant's product offerings. For the first time, we have integrated and aligned the releases of Composer with an all-new TopBraid Live and TopBraid Ensemble.

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OASIS blesses UIMA - What does it mean?

March 20, 2009

OASIS (the standards body behind things like DocBook and BPEL) approved a new standard, effictively resuscitating an arcane technology long thought by archaeologists to be dead: Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA).

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SKOS become W3C Candidate recommendation

March 17, 2009

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of SKOS Reference. The Working Group has also published a Working Draft of SKOS Primer.

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Protégé 3.4 released

March 16, 2009

Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework.

The Protégé platform supports two main ways of modeling ontologies via the Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL editors. Protégé ontologies can be exported into a variety of formats including RDF(S), OWL, and XML Schema. (more)

Protégé is based on Java, is extensible, and provides a plug-and-play environment that makes it a flexible base for rapid prototyping and application development.

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Yahoo! adds RDF support to SearchMonkey and BOSS

February 12, 2009

This could be a big step toward the “web of data” vision of the Semantic Web.

Yahoo announced (Accessing Structured Data using BOSS that their BOSS (Build your Own Search System) will now support structured data, including RDF.

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SPARQL Inference Notation

December 31, 2008

SPIN is a collection of RDF vocabularies enabling the use of SPARQL to define constraints and inference rules on Semantic Web models. SPIN also provides meta-modeling capabilities that allow users to define their own SPARQL functions and query templates. Finally, SPIN includes a ready to use library of common functions.

SPIN has been designed by TopQuadrant to solve real-world customer needs such as:

• Calculate the value of a property based on other properties - for example, area of a geometric figure as a product of its height and width, age of a person as a difference between today's date and person's birthday, a display name as a concatenation of the first and last names

• Constraint checking with closed world semantics - for example, a need to automatically raise inconsistency flags when currently available information does not fit the specified integrity constraints

• Isolate a set of rules to be executed under certain conditions - for example, to support incremental reasoning, to initialize certain values when a resource is first created, or to drive interactive applications

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Calais: Putting Wings on the Semantic Web

May 28, 2008

The OpenCalais project aims to make more of the Web easily accessible. The Calais automatically creates rich Semantic metadata from any textual input using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods.

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Google opens access to its App Engine

May 28, 2008

Google opened up access to it's "Google App Engine", a cloud-based hosted development environment, designed to let developers build applications on the same infrastructure that fuels Google's own applications.

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ReadWriteWeb - Making the Web Searchable - The Story of SearchMonkey

May 27, 2008

Yahoo! Researcher spoke in detail about the company's new SearchMonkey search platform initiative at the SemTech 2008 Conference.

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TopQuadrant's Semantic Application Development Suite for Oracle 11g RDF Rule Editing and Inferencing

May 19, 2008

TopQuadrant™, a leading semantic technology products company, today announced that the company’s TopBraid™ semantic development suite has been integrated with Oracle® Database 11g.

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Facebook to open the gates with 'Facebook Connect'

May 9, 2008

Social network Facebook announce the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology which embraces the concept of data portability. The Facebook members will be able to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites.

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MySpace about to join the Semantic Web

May 9, 2008

MySpace, the social-networking site, will let members to share information with other websites.

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A Survey of Current Approaches for Mapping of Relational Databases to RDF

May 05, 2008

W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group published a Survey of the current state of the art techniques used for conversion of Relational Databases to RDF. The different approaches to map SPARQL queries to SQL are also covered in the document.

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Digg announces adoption of a RDFa standard

May 2, 2008

The announcement from the company blog says: "We've added RDFa, making Digg part of the 'semantic web' where Web pages become more sophisticated, beyond simply words and pictures."

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Semantic MediaWiki version 1.1 released

April 21, 2008

The SMW Project announces the release of the new Semantic MediaWiki version 1.1. Main improvements are: better querying, iCal, SPARQL, wiki registry.

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RIF WG Publishes long awaited working drafts

April 16, 2008

RIF WG publishes new public working drafts of the RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD), and RIF RDF & OWL Compatibility (RDF+OWL), and the first workding draft of the RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD). Read more

6 New OWL Working Drafts

April 11, 2008

The OWL Working Group has published six new Working Drafts of its current design of OWL 2 (formerly called OWL 1.1). Published drafts are available from these URIs:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-semantics
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-mapping-to-rdf
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-xml-serialization
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer

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IBM Tutorial: Planning a Semantic Web site

April 10, 2008

The This article discusses what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web.

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Closing of the SWEO Interest Group

April 2, 2008

The W3C SWEO (Semantic Web Education and Outreach ) Interest Group finished its work.

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EBay Looks to the Semantic Web

April 2, 2008

eBay is using the Semantic Web for helping to document its systems as part of its grid computing initiative in its data center. The interview with the Director of eBay Research Labs from the Semanticweb.com explains the details.

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The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

March 13, 2008

The Yahoo released the details about two important components of the Yahoo! Search open platform - the developer platform and their support for a number of semantic web standards.

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Semantic Web Search Engines Collection at SWEO Linking Open Data

February 19, 2008

SWEO Linking Open Data Community Project maintains a collection of links to Semantic Web Search Engines. Semantic Web Search Engines are those which use robots to crawl RDF data from the Web and provide search and navigation facilities over crawled data.

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SPARQL Query Language for RDF is a W3C Recommendation

January 15, 2008

W3C announced today the publication of Topic SPARQL, the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web. With SPARQL query technology, pronounced "sparkle," people can focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications.

"Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL," explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "SPARQL makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the Web."

There are already 14 known implementations of SPARQL, many of which are open source.

Read the full article here

Cool URIs for the Semantic Web - First Public Working Draft

December 08, 2007

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group has released a first Working Draft of a document explaining the effective use of URIs to enable the growth of the Semantic Web. The “Topic URI” discusses two strategies for choosing URIs for the Semantic Web.

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Radar Networks Announces Twine A Revolutionary Semantic Web Application

October 19, 2007

Radar Networks, a pioneer of Semantic Web technology, today announced the invite-beta of Twine, a new service that gives users a smarter way to share, organize, and find information with people they trust. Twine was introduced and previewed publicly for the first time today, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit, a Web industry conference in San Francisco. Twine aims to become one of the first mainstream applications of the Semantic Web. Read more