Group items tagged

Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer. The current concept of linked data attempts to place these burdens mostly on the way data is published. While apparently "simpler" than earlier versions of the semantic Web (since linked data de-emphasizes shared vocabularies and nuanced associations), linked data places onerous burdens on how publishers express their data. Though many in the advocacy community point to the "billions" of RDF triples expressed as a success, actual consumers of linked data are rare. I know of no meaningful application or example where the consumption of linked data is an essential component. However, there are a few areas of success in linked data. DBpedia, Freebase (now owned by Google), and GeoNames have been notable in providing identifiers (URIs) for common concepts, things, entities and places. There has also been success in the biomedical community with linked data.

The holy grail of the Semantic Web is to have intelligent agents that will be able to do all types of stuff for us, similar to what Siri is starting to do. Imagine my Semantic Web agent knows that I'll be traveling to Bonn, Germany and will make a reservation at a restaurant that it thinks that I would like and that a friend has recommended. Theoretically, this is possible if all the data on the Web was published as Linked Data. Just imagine TripIt data linked to Facebook and to DBpedia which in turn is linked to Yelp and OpenTable. My Semantic Web agent would be able to query all of this data together and pull it off.

"This piece inaugurates an occasional series by or about linked data practitioners that will be cross-posted on the DLF site and  LOD-LAM.net. The first post in the series is a personal reflection on the linked data landscape written by Jerry Persons, technology analyst at Knowledge Motifs, Chief Information Architect emeritus at Stanford, and author of the CLIR-commissioned Literature survey in support of Stanford Linked Data Workshop."

We live in a connected society, where devices and data are being pulled together to profoundly change business, our personal lives, society and even nations. In this introduction to this PublicTechnology.net Agenda, I want to try to outline, in non-technical terms, some of the benefits to the sector (and ultimately the taxpayer) of extracting and linking data.

Anyone who has seen a slide presentation on Semantic Web, Linked Data, or related technologies, has most likely seen the Linking Open Data (LOD) Cloud diagram. Since its debut in 2007, the diagram has grown to its current size which includes 295 datasets in the form of a connected cloud. The data sets in the LOD cloud consist of over 31 billion RDF triples and are interlinked by around 504 million RDF links.

Dr. Bernhard Haslhofer works as instructor on Web Information Systems at Cornell Information Science. Just recently he gave a course which examined technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web. Semantic Web Company (SWC) had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Haslhofer to examine the question "How to teach Linked Data?".

This site is a demonstrator of the Information Workbench, a platform for Linked Data application development. Designed as a self-service platform, the Information Workbench provides you with all the tools and features you need to quickly build your personal Linked Data applications.

A new article reports that the British Library has announced "a significant contribution to the development, application, and sharing of bibliographic data using Linked Data techniques and technologies...

The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.

Since the open data movement has shown no declining signals, several hubs, or data markets, have been released. This was a direct consequence of the need for ways to search all different data sets

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases - married to their near cousin Big Data - are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history. There is a shared structure across all of these developments - the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links - both physical and informational - grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments. Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

LinkedEducation.org is an open platform aimed at further promoting the use of Linked Data for educational purposes.

What got Talis going on its Linked Data marketplace that launched in public beta in June, dubbed Kasabi? The recognition that there had to be a business model in making RDF data as easy to use as possible - from publishing it to querying it, all in a well-supported and sustainable fashion for providers and consumers alike.

On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

Today, thanks to the robust system that Ahad has built, we have an open repository of crawl data that covers approximately 5 billion pages and includes valuable metadata, such as page rank and link graphs. All of our data is stored on Amazon's S3 and is accessible to anyone via EC2.

Do you think enterprises and other organizations can significantly benefit from using Linked Data?  The answer is a clear YES. 

A big problem with contextualizing information is that machines still cannot think. They are only able to do calculations, so everything we do to contextualize data in a software system must be "reduced" to statistics and mathematics. When a certain problem cannot be solved using mathematics (and there are many of them!) then the user must jump in.

Some of the key findings from the 2011 State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies are: As of the date of this article, there are 1010 tools in the Sweet Tools listing, the first it has passed 1000 total tools A total of 158 new tools have been added to the listing in the last six months, an increase of 17% 75 tools have been abandoned or retired, the most removed at any period over the past five years A further 6%, or 55 tools, have been updated since the last listing Though open source has always been an important component of the listing, it now constitutes more than 80% of all listings; with dual licenses, open source availability is about 83%. Online systems contribute another 9% Key application areas for growth have been in SPARQL, ontology-related areas and linked data Java continues to dominate as the most important language.

Keynote talk at CSHALS 2012 in Boston on the Knowledge Reengineering Bottleneck: knowledge engineering in the linked data age.

Mike Bergman recently wrote a strong defense for the Semantic Web, stating, "There have been some notable attempts of late to make elevator pitches for semantic technologies, as well as Lee Feigenbaum's recent series on Are We Asking the Wrong Question? about semantic technologies. Some have attempted to downplay semantic Web connotations entirely and to replace the pitch with Linked Data (capitalized). These are part of a history of various ways to try to make a business case around semantic