Simile Position Paper

The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is as broad as that of the Web: to create a universal medium for the exchange of data. It is envisaged to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority for many organizations, individuals and communities. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently.

To faciliate the deployment of the Semantic Web it is important to demonstrate the applicability and benifits of these enabling standards in a variety of application domains. The SIMILE project seeks to apply Semantic Web technolgies to @@ elaborate on the utility of demonstrators. the specific interests to simile and the general applicability of this arch to other information sharing communuites - Simile is a minature, forced example of this web network effect. @@

Contributions

The W3C Semantic Web Advanced Devlopement interest and contribution to the SIMILE project are in a number of areas:

• To faciliate the development of a distributed information sharing architecture built on open standards. In particular in providing expertise in Semantic Web and Web Services tools and technologies which will supply the underlying infrastructure for SIMILE.
• To demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of such an architecture to other communities that have similar information sharing requirements
• To establish partnerships with organiztions, communities and initiatives that will provide data and services that faciliate the development and deployment of SIMILE
• To provide feedback to the Simile team of lessons learned by other communities (museum, archival, life sciences, medical, managing enterprise data, etc. ) working on applying Semantic Web technologies to similar information sharing problems
• To learn from the applicability of these general enabling technologies to a specific domain and relfect lessons learned back to W3C for shaping future stardards work

Demonstration

The demonstration is a minature, forced example of the web network effect.

The demo scenario includes the following set of query examples -

• "I want to write a book about Frank Lloyd Wright and his impact on modern design"
• "Who is Frank Lloyd Wright? Where can I find materials to write a term paper about him?"
• "My course is about 20th Century Design. Frank Lloyd Wright is a key figure I need to discuss"

These scenarious are useful in helping establish a shared view of the problem and scope the discussion to focus on addressing real world issues. It is important, however, to recognize the sample data sets that are being combined in the Simile project to address these requirments will in turn become the data that others will use to combine with their collections. As such its important to enable an infrastructure that allows a variety of interactions we (the members of the team) haven't yet thought of but are of equal interest to a variety of other researchers.

• "My course is about 20th Century Design. Who are the key figures I should be investigating?"
• "What previous areas of design influenced Frank Lloyd Wright"?
• "Where did Frank Lloyd Wright study? Who else studied there?"
• "What artists (woodworkers, sculpters, painters) were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright"?
• "Did Frank Lloyd Wright have any children? What did they go on to do"? (answer is 'Lloyd Wright' who is also an architect but is discovering this in traditional search engines is difficult as the text overlap is dominated by "Frank Lloyd Wright" results)
• "What Frank Lloyd Wright exibitions are going on now?"
• "I have a Frank Lloyd Wright chair. How much is it worth?"
• etc.

Enabling components for the Demonstrator

• @@ Focus on binding for 'person', 'place' and 'thing' - semantic services for authorities. @@
• @@ scalable back end store - jenasys (note spelling! :) @@
• @@ multiple human interfaces into the data - web, haystack @@
• @@ common machine interfaces into the data - e.g. joseki @@

Outcomes for the Demonstrator

• Effective demonstration of seridipituos interoperability
• Effective demonstration of recombinant metadata
• Effective demonstration value added / incremental metadata (e.g. RDF/OWL mapping are just more data)
• Effective demonstration of contextual views on same data

Conclusion

@@ to-do @@

[1] Simile demonstration script