Semantic web : the scream!

I have just blogged Paul Miller’s Talis Community Licence and realised that – I think – I used to get a feed from his/Talis blog. So I put it in the Feedreader and found a whole lot of posts on the semantic web (or Semantic Web). Now I had been battling with SPARQL for a day or two trying to make a query with real numbers (e.g.
FILTER (?foo < "1.23"^^xsd:float)
I could NOT get it to work. Finally my colleague Diana Stewart tracked it down to the fact that in some places in RDF you are allowed to use prefixes and in some places you can't. It's almost completely arbitrary. It's not in the simple tutorials. RDF is a place where if you make an inspired guess you will be wrong. The syntax (wrong, the 3-4 syntaxes) are all over the shop. XML,N3, Turtle, ???  It makes me scream.
So I was pleased to see that Jeni Tennison (one of early evangelists of XSLT, coming up with some magic tricks – and goodness you need all the tricks you can get with XSLT) had the same reaction:

• Things that make me scream: RDF “QNames” followed by RDFa, sure, but now?

Jeni shows that it’s not me that’s a mess, it’s RDF. If I’d read that 2 weeks ago I’d have saved 2 days. Danny Ayers has required semantic web reading each week.

This Week’s Semantic Web

09:05 18/09/2007, Danny Ayers, this week’s semantic web, Nodalities

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-09-17

In the Media

• Linked Data on Wikipedia
• The Semantic Naturalist – “musings on natural history, geography, and the semantic web”
• UMBC Semantic Web research mentioned in the NYT
• Yahoo! News on Semantic Report
• Podcast : Rohit Khare on syndication-oriented architecture see also SynOA What?, “piles of junk“

Docs

• GRDDL to W3 Recommendation
  • GRDDL – main specification doc
  • GRDDL Test Cases – demonstrate the expected behavior of a GRDDL-aware agent
  • GRDDL Primer – introductory material
  • GRDDL Use Cases – example applications of the technology

  + Quick Reference (PDF)
  see also How to integrate with SPARQL (not brittle!)

• Simplifying RDFa Notation
• Turtle @base
• “The World is now closed” – danbri is no longer a teenager
• Symbol languages and the Semantic Web
• Deploying Linked Data (PDF)
• Understanding SWRL (Part 3)
• An initial sketch of a KR for Semantic Web agents (as Logic Programs)
• Proving a URI is a document
• Soccer schedules, flight itineraries, timezones, and python web frameworks
• The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet – Google to join the club?
• Salesforce.com’s Platform as a Service
• Neno/Phat Architecture, plus presentation (PDF)
• Lingvoj and hubjects also Gopher URIs for FOAF – 303s, strangeness and charm…

Software News

• Sweet Tools (Version 10) – 577 Semantic Web (and related) tools Exhibited, intro
• Semantic Eco-blogging: Spotter 1.0 Released
• Sioku – Jaiku to rdf converter
• Simple Widget Markup Language (SWM) – “is a framework to create HTML pages with rich graphic elements as if they simply were extra HTML elements. The additional components are wrapped versions of the GWT [Google Widget Toolkit] widgets or can be created using GWT or SWM itself.”. See also: RDF2Go.
• Facebook FOAF generator – see also Querying Facebook in SPARQL
• Tying FOAF identity with the identity semantics of OpenID
• Y!Mash, SquidWho
• RDFa Distiller
• ProjectsUsingAperture
• Search SUMO via WordNet
• mod_atom gets a HTML template language
• Opera 9.5 alpha
• SleekXMPP

Miscellany

• Triple-I 2007 Wrapup, Web 2.0 meets Web 3.0
• Introducing Quaere – language integrated queries aka LINQ for Java
• Basing the Design of History on the User’s Memory, see also Trailblazer, #swhack discussion
• Places – “is designed to be a complete replacement for the Firefox bookmarks and history systems.”
• Jottit – “makes getting a website as easy as filling out a textbox.”
• The Database Column
• freedb data dump
• MapReduce in a Week
• Command prompt as an IM session with my computer?
• We have lost control of the apparatus

Quote of the Week

Everything is a platform!

– dull-looking character in Dilbert

See also: tagged but forgotten…
~
Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!

PMR: This has come just in time. I have offered to give a talk in 2 weeks time to Cambridge Corporate Gateway Event on “the semantic web”. The audience is concerned (I think) with how new technologies emerge and may be exploited. So I need to find some impressive Semweb stuff. I’ve now got Danny’s stuff to read – should keep me busy. And Paul is coming to talk to us in the Centre. Unfortunately it’s the next day, so I can’t re-use his material.
Help!