W3C Semantic Web News

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OWLlink protocol published as a W3C Member Submission

Mon, 2010-07-19 18:05
The “OWLlink Protocol” specification has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts from Clark & Parsia LLC, Creative Commons, Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) GmbH, NTT DOCOMO, Stanford University, University of Aberdeen, Computing Science, University of Manchester, and Vrije Universiteit. The specification defines a general, implementation-neutral protocol to access the functionalities of a reasoner acting as an (OWLlink) server. This general mechanism is defined in term of UML; separate documents define bindings of this general protocol with different syntaxes that can be used to communicate with reasoners over HTTP. Using one of these concrete protocol bindings clients can control and query reasoners using the terms defined in the general OWLlink Structure.
Categories: Ontology News

POWDER: Not So Quiet

Sat, 2010-07-17 10:28

Since it completed the Recommendation Track process last year, little has been said or written about POWDER. However, there have been a number of unrelated events recently that I take as evidence of a long term future. As chair of the WG that created it (and an editor of all but one of the documents and general front-person for the whole thing), this makes me happy!

One of my private measures of success for it has always been that one day, someone I don't know and who doesn't know me stands up at a big conference and says "you know this POWDER thing is really cool." That happened at SemTech last month when Matt Fisher presented it in a session called RDF Friday Part 3: Practical RDF - POWDER & Object Design Patterns. The full version of what he was saying is available in an article on his company website Putting POWDER to Work. Matt and I have exchanged e-mails since then but we hadn't had any contact before.

Secondly my friend and WG member Andrea Perego has been cooking up some code that uses POWDER to generate RDFa in a way that could make it really easy to add all those <link /> elements in documents on the fly under the control of a single, central POWDER file.

Suppose you want to add RDFa to all the pages on your Web site (not a bad thing to do!). One can imagine doing this for Creative Commons licences, DC metadata etc. Something like

<link rel ="cc:license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" /> <link rel="dcterms:creator" href="http://philarcher.org/foaf.rdf#me" />

These link elements should probably be included on every page of your site. Sounds like a job for POWDER. Andrea's PHP POWDER Processor (3P) can take a POWDER file and URI as inputs and return those RDFa link elements via a RESTful API - one that could easily be called from within an authoring tool. Full documentation, including an example using the Open Graph Protocol, is available.

Another development is still under wraps at the moment but the signs are very positive that a combination of marketing expertise, industry contacts, business dynamism and, not unimportantly, venture capital is coming together in a POWDER-fuelled start-up.

A quick reminder of the key features of POWDER:

  • it allows you to associate a bunch of predicates and objects with any number of subjects (as Dan Brickley puts it: it solves the aboutEachPrefix issue);
  • it's primary format is XML, a small amount of which can describe a large amount of content;
  • it has an associated GRDDL transform that renders the data as semantically-equivalent OWL;
  • a POWDER processor returns RDF triples;
  • the provenance of the data is always declared.

If you haven't looked at POWDER before, maybe now's a good time to do so.

Categories: Ontology News

Report of the RDF Next Steps Workshop published

Sun, 2010-07-11 10:13
The last week of June, participants at the W3C RDF Next Steps Workshop concluded that support for JSON, Turtle, and for "Named Graphs" are top priorities for any future work on RDF. Participants also highlighted the importance of compatibility with existing deployment. Read about these and other topics in the Workshop report. To join the discussion about organizing future work on RDF, please share your thoughts on the Semantic Web Interest Group mailing list (with a copy to the separate RDF Comments list). W3C thanks the National Center for Biomedical Ontology at Stanford, Palo Alto, USA, for hosting the Workshop.
Categories: Ontology News

Semantic Web Use Case by KISTI and KAST

Wed, 2010-07-07 14:48
KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) and KAST (Korean Agency for Technology and Standards) have provided a W3C Semantic Web Case Study on an integrated, connected search service for technical standards information, that also provides information on trends, on standard related research and development activities, etc. Ontologies were created to model the standardization process and relationships; SPARQL and RDF were used to integrate heterogeneous resources, and taxonomies helps users to ask questions in more natural language.
Categories: Ontology News

New HTML5+RDFa Draft Published

Wed, 2010-06-30 15:59
The W3C HTML5 Working Group has published 8 "heartbeat" documents. This includes a new draft of the HTML5+RDFa specification, which now refers to the latest RDFa 1.1 Core draft instead of the older, RDFa 1.0 version. In other words, new features, like the usage of default vocabularies or the profile attribute, are now available in HTML5 according to this draft.
Categories: Ontology News

W3C RIF Recommendation Published

Tue, 2010-06-22 22:10

Today W3C published a new standard for building rule systems on the Web. Declarative rules allow integration and transformation of data from multiple sources in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner. The new standard, called Rule Interchange Format (RIF), was developed with participation from the Business Rules, Logic Programming, and Semantic Web communities to provide interoperability and portability between many different systems using declarative technologies. For more information, see the RIF FAQ.

The six new standards are:

Along with these standards, W3C today published five related documents: RIF Overview, RIF Test Cases, OWL 2 RL in RIF, RIF Combination with XML data, and RIF In RDF. The RIF Working Group is also preparing a primer and a revision of its outdated Use Cases and Requirements.

Categories: Ontology News

RDB2RDF Use Cases and Requirement Drafts published by W3C

Wed, 2010-06-09 10:08
The RDB2RDF Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for Mapping Relational Databases to RDF. The need to share data with collaborators motivates custodians and users of relational databases (RDB) to expose relational data on the Web of Data. This document examines a set of use cases from science and industry, taking relational data and exposing it in patterns conforming to shared RDF schemata. These use cases expose a set of functional requirements for exposing relational data as RDF in the RDB2RDF Mapping Language (R2RML).
Categories: Ontology News

RDFa API First Public Working Draft published

Tue, 2010-06-08 20:48
The W3C RDFa Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the RDFa API. RDFa API provides a mechanism that allows Web-based applications using documents containing RDFa markup to extract and utilize structured data in a way that is useful to developers. The specification details how a developer may extract, store and query structured data contained within one or more RDFa-enabled documents. The design of the system is modular and allows multiple pluggable extraction and storage mechanisms supporting not only RDFa, but also Microformats, Microdata, and other structured data formats.
Categories: Ontology News

First Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Federation Extensions Published; Five SPARQL 1.1 Drafts Updated

Wed, 2010-06-02 07:00

The SPARQL Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Federation Extensions, which defines extensions to the SPARQL Query Language to support distributed SPARQL query execution. The group also published 5 updates, listed below. The group seeks feedback, particularly on open issues identified in each document.

Categories: Ontology News

Library Linked Data Incubator Group formed at W3C

Fri, 2010-05-21 17:33
The mission of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group is to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activities—focusing on Linked Data—in the library community and beyond, building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future. The charter of the group is available on-line; the home page of the group also includes information on how one can join the group.
Categories: Ontology News

Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Advances to W3C Proposed Recommendation

Wed, 2010-05-12 09:22

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 other drafts:

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.

Categories: Ontology News

W3C Invites Comments on First Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1, XHTML+RDFa 1.1

Thu, 2010-04-22 16:41

The RDFa Working Group has published the First Public Working Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. RDFa Core is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 is an application of RDFa Core 1.1 for XHTML. Both of these documents are expected to supersede the RDFa in XHTML (RDFa 1.0) specification. Together, these specifications enable the human-readable and machine-readable markup of people, places, events, products, recipes, social networks, and many other concepts that are frequently published on the web. These documents improve upon RDFa 1.0 by adding a number of Web community requested features to ease authoring. Comments are welcome and should be sent to the public-rdfa-wg@w3.org mailing list (see also the archives).

Categories: Ontology News

First reports of the W3C Provenance Incubator Group

Wed, 2010-04-14 09:36
The W3C Provenance Incubator Group is announcing its first report: "Requirements for Provenance on the Web". The report describes the group's consensus on the requirements to support provenance in a variety of web contexts, applications, and use. The report is based on the following documents produced by the group: The report will serve as a basis to organize a state-of-the-art survey on provenance. The group welcomes comments and feedback on this report from the Web community. More information about the W3C Provenance Group, including its current activities and future plans, is publicly available on its wiki site.
Categories: Ontology News