alexmikro.net

The implementation of Sir Tim’s “Raw Data Now” vision is well under way in the UK. UK government data are being released and the process is open for input from developers that may want to contribute. Open except from the fact that they have to join a closed Google group (a bit ironic don’t you think?).

Anyway, the data is now available in RDF and can be queried via SPARQL. You can find some useful examples of such queries from Leigh Dodds at the Talis blog. Happy querying!

Chances are anyone who has come across the terms ‘Semantic Web’ or ‘Web 3.0′, has also come across the term ‘ontology’. But what is an ontology anyway? For philosophers it is the study of all existence (including God’s!).

Computer scientists though have a more practical view of an ontology. A recent article in the IT Professional magazine of the IEEE Computer Society examines what an ontology means for the Semantic Web:

An ontology is a method of representing items of knowledge (ideas, facts, things—whatever) in a way that defines the relationships and classifica- tions of concepts within a specified domain of knowledge. It’s this ability to define a variety of useful relationships among items of knowledge, and to implement these relationships in software, that make an ontology such a powerful gadget in the knowledge manager’s toolkit.

You can download the complete article from here.

Who says the Semantic Web exists only in the minds of academics? Last week, at the closing keynote of the Semantic Technology conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times unveiled their plans of embracing the Semantic Web by releasing their corpus in the form of Linked Data. The vast amount of data owned by the New York Times will be a major addition to the rapidly growing Linked Data map. Larson pointed out:

It’s been fundamental to what we do for a long time. We feel we’re good at it, but our content is an island… This is wholly consistent with our open strategy… to facilitate access to slices of our data for those who want to include it in their applications.

Watch Larson’s announcement:

Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures, recently posted a series of articles about the latest trends on the web: Web 3.0, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web. Greg attempts an in-depth analysis of these concepts, the technologies and innovations behind them, and how they can be combined to form the next generation web. Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has posted a recap of these articles, together with some of his views on the future of the Semantic Web and the role of Google. Richard concludes:

It’s clear to us that the time for structured data has come. We’re beginning to see it in the current wave of Linked Data sets being released, and in the support that big companies, like Google and Yahoo, are showing for structured data. Who knows, maybe the Semantic Web is nearly upon us too.

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web, talked in TED 2009 about the origin and evolution of the web. He described how he first came up with the idea of hypertext on 1989 and how difficult it was to communicate this to his boss. Fortunately, he was allowed to work on it on the side as a “play project”

He also talked passionately about the future of the web and Linked Data. He believes sharing data on the web can have so many benefits and that everyone should be contributing to this. He even engaged the audience in chanting: “Raw Data Now!”.

Watch the talk here:

Can the Semantic Web improve the way we send and receive email? Yes, according to researchers from the University of Stanford. They propose a novel approach in defining email addresses, called Semantic Email Addressing (SEA). SEA replaces traditional email addresses with ’semantic’ ones. The idea is that semantic information, such as the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) Resource Description Framework (RDF), should be used to identify individuals and groups as email recipients. For example, if I want to receive updates about the Lost series, all I have to do is add this to my interests in my FOAF file. The Stanford team claims:

In a sense, SEA is the opposite of spam. Although both SEA and spam might involve unsolicited emails, spam goes to everyone, whereas SEA is targeted toward those who’ve publicly announced their interest in the SEA mail topic. SEA is a marketer’s dream come true. Moreover, unlike mailing lists, it requires no discovery for either the sender or the receiver.

Cloud Computing is about replacing desktop-based computing resources with internet-based ones. The driving concept is called Software as a Service (SaaS), according to which software applications are licensed for use as services provided to customers on demand. This is similar to how traditional utilities like electricity or water are charged.

The latest issue of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal features Cloud Computing and includes an article on Semantic Web applications. The authors claim that the volume of computing resources on the cloud can help deal with the explosion of web data and the scalability problems of the Semantic Web. They describe a number of such initiatives: Hadoop’s MapReduce, as well as the HBase and Yahoo! Pig extensions. The purpose of these open-source platforms is large-scale processing of semantic RDF datasets without any scalability limits.

Being a major content owner, the BBC is using Semantic Web technologies to efficiently manipulate this content and improve the services offered to the public.

I met Richard Wright of the BBC Archive in the AXMEDIS conference in Barcelona on November 2007. He was showing then a demo of their system, which uses the GATE web services for NLP (Natural Language Processing) on textual news items. News items are analyzed to extract named entities according to an ontology, such as person names, companies, locations, etc. The attributes of the entities are also extracted, e.g. the position of a person within a company. The demo also showed video indexing with the use of various techniques.

The BBC Artists pages were recently launched, using Semantic Web technologies to enrich artists’ profiles and link them to external resources, such as Wikipedia entries. Matthew Shorter, BBC’s interactive editor for music, told CNET UK that “this is part of a general movement that’s going on at the BBC to move away from pages that are built in a variety of legacy content production systems to actually publishing data that we can use in a more dynamic way across the Web.”

The Calais initiative by Thomson Reuters is an excellent example of Semantic Web technologies being smoothly incorporated into common web activities, such as blogging. It uses Natural Language Processing to analyze text and extract named entities (e.g. persons, companies), facts (e.g. employee positions), and events (e.g. mergers, acquisitions).

I have been using Calais in this blog, through the Tagaroo plugin for Wordpress. While I type a post, Tagaroo analyzes the text using the Calais web service, and suggests relevant tags and Flickr images. So far, the plugin works very well, without any glitches. Its proposals are usually quite successful and most tags of this blog have been created this way.

Here is a screenshot with the tags and images suggested by Tagaroo for this post (click on it for full size):

Calais can currently analyze texts only in English and French, but more languages are on the way. Let’s hope we see support for Greek soon!