Ontology Outreach Advisory

Creative Commons has published a member submission by W3C: "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language". The document introduces the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the vocabulary recommended by Creative Commons for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information. The language is based on RDF and the document also includes recommendations on how to encode ccRel information in different formats.

W3C’s Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published five Working Drafts. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata. The following documents have been published:

• Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata
• Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set.
• Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools
• Primer (First Public Draft)
• Test Suite (First Public Draft)

Last Call comments are welcome through 14 September.

A group of experts from the municipality of Zaragoza and the CTIC foundation published a new Semantic Web Use Case, as part of the SW Case Study and Use Case collection. It describes an eTourism application: users can personalize their city tour using a specialized service (called “CRUZAR”) that integrates relevant databases (with RDF and specialized Ontologies), and that translates the users’ wishes and profiles in a set of rules on those data. A matching algorithm is then run to produce a personalized itinerary.

W3C invites people to participate in a Workshop on Semantic Web in Energy Industries; Part I: Oil & Gas to be hosted by Chevron in Houston, Texas, USA on 9-10 December 2008. Participants will explore how Semantic Web technologies can play a role in the management and analysis of the huge amounts of data gathered from highly diverse sources in this sector of the energy industry. Position papers are due 19 September.

Not satisfied until it had achieved perfection, the long-awaited last call drafts of the RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) and RDF + OWL Compatibility (SWC) have been published. The drafts reflect the result of either widespread consensus on numerous technical issues or sheer exhaustion - you be the judge! The working group seeks feedback on these drafts as the last call status indicates the design is believed to be stable and complete.

In conjunction with the last call drafts, the working group also published the highly anticipated first working draft of the RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD), as well as the BLD companion documents Datatypes and Builtins (DTB), and Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD). Finally, a new, improved and updated version of the RIF Use Cases and Requirements (UCR), that now uses BLD presentation and XML syntax in the examples.

The RIF WG is still expecting to release the Last Call drafts of BLD (Basic Logic Dialect) and RDF+OWL Compatiblity shortly. In the final round of internal reviews, a few minor technical problems were found and resolved, as well as confusions about the role of data types and builtins that pushed the expected completion dates out further.

Currently RIF expects to release last call drafts of BLD and RDF+OWL, as well as WDs of UCR, DTB, and FLD, and the first production rule WD in early August.

The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Formal Semantics. This document underpins the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER). It describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed through two stages, first into a more tightly constrained XML format (POWDER-BASE), and then into an RDF/OWL encoding (POWDER-S) that may be processed by Semantic Web tools. The formal semantics of POWDER are best understood after the reader is acquainted with the Description Resources and Grouping of Resources documents.

Today, with the publication of the French translation of the RDF Test Cases by Jean-Jacques Solari, the whole suite of RDF Recommendations are available in French. In view of the complexity of those documents, the two translators (Xavier Lacot and Jean-Jacques Solari) deserve the community’s thanks…

Note that the only other language with a full translation is Hungarian (done by Ernő Pataki), with some documents available in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Polish, and Russian. Hopefully more will follow…

The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published two Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Drafts: Grouping of Resources and Description Resources. The first document describes how to publish descriptions of multiple resources such as all those available from a Web site. These descriptions are always attributed to a named individual, organization or entity that may or may not be the creator of the described resources. The second publication provides a means for individuals or organizations to create machine-readable descriptions.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group have published a Candidate Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. Web 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. RDFa is a specification for attributes to be used with languages such as HTML and XHTML to express structured data. See the groups' RDFa implementation report (although this document is still evolving as new implementations come in). The Working Groups also updated the companion document RDFa Primer.

A set of RDFa technology buttons have also been published, linked in from the Semantic Web logos' index page.

A group of experts from Audi, Achievo Inproware, and ontoprise published a new Semantic Web Use Case, as part of the SW Case Study and Use Case collection. It describes a system used for the simulation of car electronics systems, helping the development of new electronics components. An interesting aspect, from the Semantic Web point of view, is the way knowledge from various IT systems, users, engineers, etc., could be integrated using a combination of domain specific ontologies and rules.

Alexandre Passant has published a new Semantic Web Case Study, as part of the SWEO Collection. It describes a system deployed at the R&D department of Electricité de France (EDF), and shows how to integrate enterprise level social software (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) into a coherent user tool using Semantic Web technologies.

One of the interesting points is that, although this is an “intranet” application, the system makes also use of the various open datasets that the Linking Open Data project has made available for the Semantic Web, like Geonames or DBPedia (the latter through a separate, tagging software called MOAT). Ie, the system is a bona fide application of the LOD project for real users, in a real environment…

On May 26-28th, the RIF WG met in Galway, Ireland for its 10th face to face meeting. The three-day meeting hosted by DERI, Galway set a record with 40 resolutions passed, including decisions to publish the RIF-BLD (Basic Logic Dialect) and the RIF SWC (RDF&OWL Compatibility) specs as last call. With a little editorial work remaining after the meeting, the group plans to publish BLD and SWC on June 23, as well as moving all the other current drafts to the next public WD stage.

The RIF F2F10 page can be found here.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published a Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. SKOS aims to provide a bridge between different communities of practice within the library and information sciences involved in the design and application of knowledge organization systems. In addition, SKOS aims to provide a bridge between these communities and the Semantic Web, by transferring existing models of knowledge organization to the Semantic Web technology context, and by providing a low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to RDF. See also the changes from the previous draft.

The W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group has published two Group Notes: A Prototype Knowledge Base for the Life Sciences and Experiences with the conversion of SenseLab databases to RDF/OWL. The former describes a prototype of a biomedical knowledge base that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies including RDF and OWL. The Note outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using SPARQL, and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains. The second document describe the experience of converting SenseLab databases into OWL, an important step towards realizing the benefits of Semantic Web in integrative neuroscience research.

Chime Ogbuji, Scott Marshall and I are very excited to be co-chairing the new W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG).

We'd like to start off by giving a big thank you to Eric Neumann and Tonya Hongsermeier for having chaired the first HCLSIG, and for having got such a great group of people involved.

We are going to be hosting an initial kickoff call between 11am and 12.30pm ET on June 12, where we will introduce the group, describe the benefits of joining, summarize the new charter, highlight our thoughts for interesting projects, and share details about the first F2F meeting.

This is an excellent time for new people to join the HCLSIG. If you are interested in learning more, or participating in the call, please send an email to the co-chairs at: team-hcls-chairs@w3.org