The more we use the Internet, the more we realize the necessity of finding new solutions to better organize the growing mass of information. Today we actually have a certain number of tools to add meaning to the information that we drop all over the Web. Adding a comprehensible meaning to computers, allowing them to help us better organize things. That's the big idea behind the Semantic Web, an idea which appears more and more obvious to us everyday. In this field, we already have many advanced technologies, starting with those offered by the W3C itself: XML, RDF, OWL, etc.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 1 - Backlinks

Today we reach an important milestone in this series. We are crossing a great divide between familiar technologies such as XML, Unicode, URI, and RDF to the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This, my friends, is where things really start to get interesting because this is the point where the Semantic Web vision really starts to take form. Today, we present a screencast exhibiting Protégé — a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework developed by Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In this screencast, we show you how to develop a useful Semantic Web-ready application in just minutes. You will learn how to model a very simple ontology in OWL (the Web Ontology Language).

Continue reading Introduction to Semantic Web Vision and Technologies - Part 4 - Protege 101 (Screencast)

After the last post about "web of agents", I received a few questions about the "web of data." A few readers mistook my argument to be opposite of a web of data. Don't get me wrong, I have never been opposed to the presentation of a "web of data." I only emphasize that the web-of-data presentation is short of describing the human-web relationship in the Semantic Web. To encourage the engagement of more ordinary people to the grand vision of the Semantic Web, we need a more user-oriented presentation, i.e. a web of agents.

Continue reading Metadata or Hyperdata, Link or Thread, What is a Web of Data?

Update: Joe from the Squio blog has posted a response to this entry.

Microformats are a wildly popular set of formats for embedding metadata within normal XHTML. The primary advantage Microformats offer over RDF (including its embedded serializations) is that you can embed metadata directly in the XHTML, reducing the amount of markup you need to write (e.g. you don't have to write XHTML and additional RDF). Many people have contended that Microformats are a possible replacement for RDF, however Microformats were not designed to cover the same scope as RDF was. While both Microformats and RDF make it possible to store data about data, they simply do not work to solve the same set of problems.

Continue reading Microformats vs. RDF: How Microformats Relate to the Semantic Web

In Part 2 of this series we reviewed Unicode, URI, and XML - three foundational technologies that permeate the existing Web and that are especially relevant to the emerging Semantic Web. We will put all three to use as we take our next step up the Semantic Web layer cake in a review of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). At the same time, we will be taking the visual RDF/OWL editor, Altova SemanticWorks, for a test drive. Since I will be using this tool for the very first time, you can expect an honest review that is rich with screenshots. If you do not already have the software, you may wish to download the trial version now so you can follow along.

Continue reading Introduction to the Semantic Web Vision and Technologies - Part 3 - The Resource Description Framework

Here's another list of interesting links for your reading pleasure! If you find a site or article that would fit well in a Link Roundup post send it our way!

• Books on Semantic Web
• Microsoft Manager: "needed a robust and scalable RDF repository"
• Towards the Web of Intentions
• Another mainstream online video app using RDF
• Web Evolution
• New RDF Book
• Open Data Licences

Open your data! That's the theme behind the new Semantic Web logo created by the W3C. The three sides of the tri-color cube are meant to represent the RDF triple model, and the peeled back lid is suggestive of the main theme of opening your data for everyone to access. For now they ask that you use the images that include the W3C logo, at least until the new Semantic Web logo becomes more widely recognized on its own.

They've also created 80x15 sized buttons for RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and GRDDL! I'm not too wild about those kinds of buttons, but I'm sure we'll see them springing up everywhere in no time. The buttons come in blue, green, orange, gray, and purple.

Over the weekend I opened the doors to Planet Semantic Focus, our Semantic Web buzz aggregator! In a nutshell, PSF makes it easy for you to keep tabs on what's going within the Semantic Web community. In its current version (beta) the system is tracking blog posts from various sources and bloggers.

Continue reading Planet Semantic Focus: Aggregating Semantic Web Buzz

The debate over whether Web 3.0 has a place in our buzzword vocabulary is going to be brutal battle between big names with big opinions, as we've seen already. I've already posted my feelings about Web 3.0, and those may change or stay the same. I'm still on the fence with Web 3.0, but I'm leaning towards "no thanks," and I'm not the only one.

Continue reading The Web 3.0 Debate Continues to Unfold

Here's a list of interesting links for your Saturday morning! I've included the chain of blog posts about recommended Semantic Web books, a post by Mike Bergman about how much he doesn't like the term "Web 3.0," and a few other interesting sites. Enjoy!

Continue reading Link Roundup for October 6th, 2007