W3C Semantic Web Activity Update

Sandro Hawke (MIT-CSAIL, W3C)

DAML PI Meeting, San Antonio, Texas

30 November 2004

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• 367 member organizations
• Paid staff of 72
• Hundreds of Working Group participants
• About 25 "Activities" (areas of work)
• Celebrating 10th anniversary tomorrow
  
• consider joining!
• visit w3.org

Semantic Web Activity

• Standards Work
• Education and Outreach
• Ontaria and Ontology Hosting
• Other Software Development

Submissions

Focusing Attention on Possible Precursors to Standards

• SWRL submission acknowledged before last PI mtg
• OWL-S submission acknowledged last week
• Gives wider industry awareness of SWS
• W3C SWS Workshop now planned for 1H05
• Challenge: how to get long-term consensus in SWS?

Working Groups

Forging Industry Consensus -> W3C Recommendations

• RDF Core and WebOnt have been done for almost a year
• Data Access Working Group (DAWG)
• Best Practices and Deployment Working Group

Data Access Working Group (DAWG)

• Wide-scale, global RDF access to data
• Requirements and Use Cases mostly done
• SPARQL Query Language for RDF, First Working Draft released
• Three SPARQL implementations already (in algae, jena, redland)
• Aiming for Candidate Recommendation in Apr 2005

DAWG Questions for You

Should the first version support...

• SOURCE
• disjunction
• optional bindings

See SPARQL draft for details

Best Practices and Deployment

Task Forces

• OEP - Ontology Engineering and Patterns (Chris Welty. Deb McGuinness)
• PORT - Porting Thesaurii to RDF and OWL (Alistair Miles)
• WordNET (Aldo Gangemi)
• VM - Vocabulary Management (Tom Baker)
• XSCH - XML Schema Datatypes (Jeremey Carroll)
• HTML - Embedding RDF in HTML (Ben Adida)
• ADTF - Applications and Demos (Libby Miller, Brian McBride)
• RDFTM - RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability (Steve Pepper)

Best Practices Questions

What else can the WG do to speed deployment?

What are the most effective ways we can engage the user communities' practical questions?

Outreach: Interest Groups

Building Community

• An umbrella
• Wiki at esw.w3.org
• Mailing lists
• Task forces
• Meetings, workshops possible

Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG)

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/interest/

• Replaces "RDF Interest Group"
• Use semantic-web@w3.org now
• IRC channel #swig (irc.freenode.net:6667)
• Others lists: www-rdf-logic, www-rdf-rules, public-rdf-thes, www-rdf-calendar, public-semweb-lifesci, www-annotation

Semantic Web Services Interest Group (SWS-IG)

http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/swsig/

• IRC channel #sws-ig (irc.freenode.net:6667)
• Mailing list: public-sws-ig@w3.org
• Nearly 400 readers
• Low traffic (mostly about OWL-S now)
• Bridge between communities
• ... Use it!

Outreach: Workshops

Mobilizing a Community to Charter New Work

1. Life Sciences Workshop
2. Semantic Web Services (SWS) Workshop Planned 1H05
3. Rule Language Workshop Planned 1H05

Services: Ontaria

Connecting the Creators and Users of Ontologies

http://www.w3.org/2004/ontaria

• Keyword Search (since September)
• Ontology Views
• Category and Industry trees (coming soon)
• Fast: supports Edit/Reload/Test cycle
• Some inference, with explanations
• Gathers data for usage metrics

Ontology Hosting

Providing Stable Web Space for Ontologies

• Coming Soon
• http://www.w3.org/2004/12/your-name-here
• requires some metadata and licensing
• otherwise lightweight
  • Web-Form interface (no human in loop)
  • no specific restrictions, no editorial feedback

Other Projects

• Simile: extending DSpace; Libraries and Personal Information Management
• SKOS:bridging to non-OWL classification communities
• Redland: C-based RDF toolkit
• SWED: Sem Web Environmental Directory

Key Points

• Two WGs proceeding; your input is important
• SWS and Rules workshops planned for 1H05
• Ontaria at 0.8. Please try new releases and let us know if they don't meet your needs

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/1130-swup/

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