SWAD-Europe Deliverable 3.13: Developer Workshop Report 3 - Introduction to the Semantic Web

[versión española]

Contents

Executive Summary

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Workshop
4. Outcomes

Appendix A. Projects and Tools

Executive Summary

This workshop brought together Spanish speakers interested in developing Semantic Web technologies. It was held entirely in Spanish..

The workshop was hosted by LaRed.es, with additional support from Barrapunto.com. Attendees came from all over Spain, from the four target communities (open-source and commercial developers, academia and the government sector).

In addition the discussion was noted live on IRC, so further participation from Spain and Argentina was made possible.

The workshop had the following outcomes:

• Development of a tutorial for the cwm RDF parser in Spanish
• Introducing a range of Spanish developers to the Semantic Web
• Demonstrating some work that has been done in Spanish
• Inspiring a further workshop on the same topic in South America
• Motivating the use of the Spanish language developers list Web-Semantica-Ayuda

1 Introduction

This report is part of the SWAD-Europe project Work package 3: Dissemination and Implementation. It describes the developer workshop "Introducción a la Web Semántica" held in Madrid, Spain, on 13 June 2004, in Spanish.

The principal objectives of the workshop were

• Introduce spanish developers to some of the principal ideas and some tools for the Semantic Web in their own language.
• Present some of the work on the Semantic Web being done in Spanish and in Spain.
• Motivate more of the spanish developer community in various areas of work concerning the Semantic Web

2 Background

There is work done on the Semantic Web in Spain, but much of it takes place, or is published, only in English. For people interested it is very difficult to find information available in Spanish. To introduce more members of the Spanish-speaking development community to the Semanic Web, and to introduce developers to each other, some members of the Web-Semantica-Ayuda list suggested a workshop in Spanish. The fact that another SWAD-Europe workshop was being organised in Madrid made the organisation easy, further assisted by the generous help of Hispalinux, Lared.es and Barrapunto.com. Within five days of announcing the workshop the available places were already oversubscribed, with many people asking to be placed on the waiting list.

3 Workshop

Four formal presentations were given in the workshop:

Introducción a la Web Semántica con CWM (Introduction to the Semantic Web with CWM)

An introduction to RDF, using tools available in spanish (foaf-a-matic, Hera) to create RDF and cwm to aggregate and query the information. This presentation was made by Charles McCathieNevile of the SWAD-Europe project

Recuperación, relación y inserción de metadatos en imagenes (Experience of implementing the Semantic Web with Annotea and Amaya)

This presentation demonstrated the Annotea and RDF bookmarks work done in Amaya by José Kahan, a project member, using Redland and Raptor, all developed as part of the SWAD-Europe project.

Automatización de Tesauros y su utilización en la Web Semántica (Automating Thesauri, and their use in the Semantic Web)

This presentation described the use of SKOS, a vocabulary developed as part of the SWAD-Europe project. It covered a comparison of SKOS with other thesaurus systems, the process of developing SKOS tools using Jena, and further development to make thesauri accessible via Web services and similar frameworks. It was made by José Ramón Peréz Agüera of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid.

Recuperación, relación y inserción de metadatos en imagenes (retrieving, relating and inserting metadata in images)

This presentation was made by Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo of the Fundación Sidar. It discussed the state of the art in image annotation tools and vocabularies for describin multimedia, and introduced RDFPic Extended, a tool developed by Vincent Tabard in conjunction with Fundación Sidar, based on W3C's RDFPic software.

Attendance

The workshop was attended in person by representatives of the following organisations. The use of IRC allowed further participation from Spain and Argentina, and others to follow without participating.

• Barrapunto.com
• Fundación Sidar
• Gloobal
• Hispalinux
• Internet Web Serveis, SL
• Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación
• ONCE
• TLDP-ES
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Universidad Naciónal de Educación a Distancia
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Universidad de Valencia
• Universidad de Zaragoza
• W3C
• Ximetrix
• XSTO

4. Outcomes

The ideas, the model and syntax of RDF were introduced to Spanish developers. A number of projects and tools were presented in some detail - see Appendix A. This community, including those who were unabel to be physically present at the workshop, were introduced to the use of IRC with "chump" a tool often used by the english-speaking RDF development community to permit real-time collaboration at a distance.

Since the workshop, the level of discussion on the Web-Semantica-Ayuda list, an the participation of Spanish speakers in the #rdfig IRC channel have increased noticeably, both in quantity and in technical quality. From this higher level of visibility we expect the work of Spanish speaking developers to receive more exposure and recognition internationally. We expect the increased level of discussion both within the Spanish speaking developer community, and between that community and the international community at large, to advance the technical practice of those developers.

A likely outcome of the workshop is a further series of workshops in Spanish, both in Spain and in Sout America. We expect these workshops to lead to a further increase in the availability and visibility of documentation in Spanish.

This workshop has made a measurable contribution towards those goals, leading to the production of new introductory material, and resulting in further discussion within the Spanish-speaking semantic web developer community in the Web-Semantica-Ayuda list and other widely-read mailing lists.

A record of the discussion (in Spanish) is available, which includes comments and notes made by the participants and other developers.

The evaluations of the workshop suggested that the content was very appropriate, and the workshop achieved its primary goals. But participants felt that it would have been better to have a lot more time, allowing for more in-depth discussion of some interesting issues such as the relationship between RDF and other technologies deisgned for specific tasks, or how to choose, create and use vocabularies.

Appendix A Projects and Tools

Amaya

A browser/editor for the Web, developed as an open-source project led by W3C and INRIA. It includes an interface for Annotea annotations, and uses the RDF bookmark vocabulary. The interface can be set to a number of of languages including English and Spanish.

Annotea

An protocol for making annotations about any type of Web content, using RDF. The Annotea project, financed in part by SWAD-E, has invluded development of a server, client library code in several languages, and implementation of a complete user interface in Amaya, as well as the protocol itself.

Chump

A program that can collect comments about something of interest from an IRC channel, provding a summary page which is more readable than a complete log of the discussion. It is used heavily by the RDF community in the #rdfig channel.

CWM

An RDF parser developed as an open source project led by Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly. An introduction to its use (in Spanish) was developed for and presented at the workshop.

EARL

An RDF vocabulary to describe conformance of a resource to a list of requirements. An introduction to the code, EARL by example is available in a number of languages including English and Spanish.

FOAF

An RDF vocabulary to describe people, with various attributes including whom they know.

Foaf-a-matic

A Web page that permits a user to create a FOAF RDF file by filling in a form. Created by Leigh Dodds, a Spanish translation was made by Leandro Mariano López

Foafnaut

A graphic browser (in SVG) for FOAF information. From Jim Ley

Foaf Explorer

A browser for FOAF information, presenting a large variety of information in a web page.

Hera

A tool that permits a user to evaluate the accessibility of a web page according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and create a report using the RDF vocabulary EARL (supplemented with some specific terms). From the Fundación Sidar, it has a web-based interface, available in a number of languages including English and Spanish.

Jena

A Java RDF parsing package, developed as an open source project led by Hewlett Packard, and in part through the SWAD-E project.

Raptor

An RDF parser in C, developed as an open source project led by Dave Beckett, in part through the SWAD-E project.

RDFPic Extended (mixed site in english, french and spanish)

A tool developed by Vincent Tabard, in collaboration with Fundación Sidar, based on RDFPic from W3C. This version functions with an infrastructure of Apache/PHP, and is designed to function via a Web-based interface.

Redland

A framework for RDF programing. Developed as an open source project led by Dave Beckett, in part through the SWAD-E project, it permits a programmer to have access to RDF parsing (normally through Raptor) through APIs available in a number of programming languages (e.g. C, Ruby, PERL, Java)

SKOS

An RDF/OWL vocabulary produced as part of the SWAD-E project, for encoding rich thesauri.

ximDEX (in Spanish)

A commercial content management system, based on XML, currently used to generate public portals such as the Ministry of Public Administration in Spain..