Semantic Web Use Cases

Metadata is becoming increasingly important in all types of publishing. Documents containing metadata can greatly increase the utility of managed assets in collaborative production workflows. The eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) provides Adobe applications and workflow partners with a common XML framework that standardizes the creation, processing, and interchange of document metadata across publishing workflows.

XMP encompasses the following: framework, schema, XMP packet technology, and the XMP Software Development Kit, which is available as an open-source license. XMP is based on RDF.

XMP embeds metadata inside application files. Because the metadata is enclosed within the file, documents retain their context when they leave their original system or environment. The embedded metadata can include any XML schema, provided it is described in RDF syntax. Extensible, embedded metadata in application files provides significant potential for repurposing, archiving, and automation in publishing workflows.

Available as an open-source license, XMP can be integrated into any system or application. Adobe has integrated the XMP framework into Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Adobe FrameMaker 7.0, Adobe GoLive 6.0, Adobe InCopy 2.0, Adobe InDesign 2.0, Adobe Illustrator 10, and Adobe LiveMotion 2.0.

Industry support for the XMP framework comes from companies such as Documentum, IBM, Kodak, KPMG, North Plains Systems, and many others.

Additional information on Adobe's XMP can be found in A Manager's Introduction to Adobe eXtensible Metadata Platform, The Adobe XML Metadata Framework

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The NCI Thesaurus is a public domain description logic-based terminology produced by the National Cancer Institute, distributed as a component of the NCI Center for Bioinformatics. It is deep and complex compared to most broad clinical vocabularies, implementing rich semantic interrelationships between the nodes of its taxonomies. The semantic relationships in the Thesaurus are intended to facilitate translational research and to support the bioinformatics infrastructure of the Institute. Topics described in the ontology include diseases, drugs, chemicals, diagnoses, genes, treatments, anatomy, organisms, and proteins.

The NCI Thesaurus evolved from the NCI Metathesaurus. NCI Metathesaurus is based on the National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. The NCI Metathesaurus has been operational since 1999. A public version is available at http://ncimeta.nci.nih.gov

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National Cancer Institutes cancer ontology is one of the largest OWL ontologies developed to date and consists of over 500,000 triples.

Libraries worldwide face significant challenges in coping with the increasing amounts of digital material that they must acquire from external sources, either digital publishers or material produced by their institution (e.g. by the faculty and researchers of an academic institutions). These materials require new methods for long-term stewardship and preservation in addition to those that have evolved for print and other analog material.

Libraries must consider how these materials will be acquired, either from publishers or faculty, and deposited into library repositories, as well as their long-term storage, management, and preservation. They must arrange for an array of managed digital services including storage, transformation and transcoding, indexing, search, and access. Institutions need digital repository solutions that span these needs, allowing them to offer services for digital resources in the same way that they have in the past offered services for physical resources.

DSpace is an insitutional digital repository developed by Hewlet-Packard Laboratories and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, and is currently in production at MIT. Faculty and researchers can submit their research output (for example: papers, image collections, datasets, audio, video) to relevant "communities" in DSpace for long-term stewardship by the MIT Libraries.

Researchers at MIT and around the world can then find and access resources in the DSpace corpus, with the assurance that MIT Libraries is committed to keeping those resources available over time. At MIT, DSpace runs on hardware donated by HP. The system also works on a variety of Unix and Linux platforms. HP and MIT have made the DSpace software available via an open-source, BSD-style license (see http://www.dspace.org).

During 2003, MIT Libraries will work with libraries at several other academic research institutions that wish to adopt the DSpace to provide similar service on digital resources. MIT, HP, and these institutions hope to create a federated system in which, over time, the collective resources of the world's leading research institutions are made available to the world.

As the library's role in collecting, managing, and preserving digital material produced by its organization expands, users will expect to be able to find, access, and use these materials from anywhere in the world, now and at any time in the future.

Delivering on the promise of this vision will require advances in inter-operability among the digital resources under institutional management - wherever they are physically hosted - and between those resources and web services that consume and/or produce descriptions, annotations, and additional resources. HP, through its ongoing strategic alliance with MIT, has funded "Simile", a research project extending DSpace in the direction of the semantic web.

SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the W3C, HP, MIT Libraries, and MIT's Lab for Computer Science. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemas, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemas, and metadata held in such stores.

Simile will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemas and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, we hope that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

W3C's Experimental Semantic Search is an extension of W3C's search service that helps contextualize a users query in terms of relevant W3C documents, activities, people, and services. Given a users search term, TAP provides for the ability to look up the term in a Knowledge Base (a collection of related information). If the term is found in the Knowledge Base (KB), based on the type of the concept it denotes, we determine the kinds of activities that are typically associated with that concept. Based on that, we determine the kinds of data (i.e, property types of the concept) from the global graph that should be used to augment the search results.

OSAF's product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler,) is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, Chandler might be called the first Interpersonal Information Manager. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)

Chandler draws on a number of open source projects, including Jabber and Mozilla and is bound together by Python. Much of the application logic will be written in Python and it will be the language used for extending the application through plug-ins and scripting.

RDF is used to facilitate the exchange of structured information between applications. Chandler plans on import and export RDF-formatted information and support RDF schema semantics.

As with all large organizations, Sun Microsystems employees are faced with information overload on a daily basis as they attempt to use the Web as a tool to find the knowledge needed to do their jobs effectively. While Sun's employees and business partners create and share new knowledge every day during the course of business, because this knowledge is challenging to capture and reuse much is lost. By capturing this knowledge and sharing it effectively with partners and employees, Sun can greatly increase business efficiencies, drive revenues and further its competitive edge in the marketplace. With these benefits in mind, Sun has placed great emphasis on the discipline of knowledge management to further its business goals.

This focus on knowledge management led to the creation of a Global Knowledge Architecture for Sun. The architecture, conceived by Sun's Global Knowledge Engineering Group (GKE) in Sun Services, provides a business and technical framework for sharing knowledge worldwide. Of primary concern to the GKE group is the ability to capture and share the knowledge assets required to provide best-in-class service to its customers.

A key foundation piece of the Global Knowledge Architecture is enabling consistent semantic markup of knowledge assets to allow forpersonalized, localized and dynamic delivery of content from Sun's vast knowledge bases across the organization. The Sun Metadata Initiative was launched to provide a framework to share a common set of metadata elements, taxonomies, and vocabularies for use across the enterprise. Prior to the launch of the initiative, the use of semantic markup was inconsistent, making it impossible to share and repurpose content in an automated fashion. To achieve this vision, the Sun Metadata Team has leveraged the work of the W3C's Semantic Web which provides technologies and standards to support machine processing of content based on its semantic meaning.

W3C encourages the translation of its Technical Reports by volunteers, provided that guidelines in the Copyright FAQ are observed. Volunteers have contributed thousands of hours translating W3C publications into more than thirty (30) languages.

Managing large collections of multilingual content and making this easily availiable through many differing organizational facets is a difficult task. To faciliate this, W3C uses RDF for managing this content. XHTML documents and dynamic views for indexes of translated W3C Technical Reports are then derived from this information. Links from translations to official versions are provided; reports may be viewed according to language or technology. The application generates XHTML and RDF-encoded XML files using Python scripts. The Python scripts also have a set of published CGI entry points which facilitate the construction of "query" URIs to obtain specialized views of document subsets; views based upon language and technology can be generated using these CGI entry points. A follow-on project will extend support to include in-progress translation activities.

PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata is a metadata specification developed in the publishing industry. Magazine publishers and their vendors formed the PRISM Working Group to identify the industry's needs for metadata and define a specification to meet them. Publishers want to use existing content in many ways in order to get a greater return on the investment made in creating it. Converting magazine articles to HTML for posting on the web is one example. Licensing it to aggregators like LexisNexis is another. All of these are "first uses" of the content; typically they all go live at the time the magazine hits the stands. The publishers also want their content to be "evergreen". It might be used in new issues, such as in a retrospective article. It could be used by other divisions in the company, such as in a book compiled from the magazine's photos, recipes, etc. Another use is to license it to outsiders, such as in a reprint of a product review, or in a retrospective produced by a different publisher. This overall goal requires a metadata approach which emphasizes discovery, rights tracking, and end-to-end metadata. PRISM is an RDF/XML vocabulary designed to facilitate these goals for the publishing industry.