Semantic Web Activity News

Tecnalia, in Spain, has provided a W3C Semantic Web Case Study on the Aquaring portal on aquatic resources. The portal offers a multilingual semantic search engine, a semantic tag cloud adapted to user context, map, exhibitions, etc. The initial aim was to offer a multilingual and unique access point to a heterogeneous and distributed collection of digital resources. This collection was provided by European expert organizations, keeping in mind the possible future integration into Europeana: the European Digital Library.

W3C and XBRL International have announced the organization of a Workshop on “Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web”. From the Call for Paper:

The goal of this workshop is to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies. What are the use cases? Who are the stakeholders? What are the potential roadblocks and how can they be addressed? How can new applications be created based upon integrating XBRL with other sources of information?

The main outcome of the workshop will be the publication of a report that will serve as a guide for further work in both W3C and XBRL International.

The Workshop will take place in Arlington, Virginia, on the 5-6 October, 2009. The Workshop is co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, and is hosted by FDIC.

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Last Call Working Drafts. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with other Semantic Web technologies. Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

• The RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD) is designed for the kinds of rules used in modern Business Rule Management systems.
• The RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) is a foundation for Logic Programming, classical logic, and related formalisms.
• The RIF Core Dialect is the common subset of PRD and BLD, useful when having a ubiquitous platform is paramount.

The other drafts:

• RIF Datatypes and Builtins (DTB) specifies the datatypes and standard operations (modeled on XPath Functions) available in all RIF dialects
• RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies how RIF works with RDF, RDFS, OWL 1, and OWL 2.
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD) provides a mechanism for specifying extended dialects, beyond BLD, when more expressive power is required.

The Working Group requests comments be sent to public-rif-comments@w3.org by 31 July 2009.

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SPARQL New Features and Rationale. This document provides an overview of the main new features of SPARQL and their rationale. This is an update to SPARQL adding several new features that have been agreed by the SPARQL WG. These language features were determined based on real applications and user and tool-developer experience.

Сергей Щербак (Sergey Shcherbak) has published a Russian translation of the SPARQL Query Language, under the title “Язык запросов SPARQL для RDF”.

The “XSPARQL” specification has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts of Asemantics S.R.L., DERI Galway, Fundación CTIC, INRIA, Ontotext, OpenLink Software Inc., Profium, Talis Information Ltd., and the University of Innsbruck. This specification defines a merge of SPARQL and XQuery, and has the potential to bring XML and RDF closer together. XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL.

Sylwia Tesarska has published a Polish translation of the OWL Guide, under the title “OWL Język Ontologii Sieciowej Przewodnik”. Also, Dorota Szwarc has published a Polish translation of the OWL Web Ontology Language Reference, under the title “OWL Język Ontologii Sieciowej Referencja”.

程龚 (Gong Chen) has published a Simplified Chinese translation of the RDFa primer, under the title “RDFa入门”.