The Semantic Web In Practice

Eric Miller
W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead

DC-2005: Vocabularies in Practice

Madrid, 15 de Septiembre de 2005

Slides are available at http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/0915-semweb-em/

Outline

Overview
Commercial applications
Research applications
Practical work thats relevant to DCMI
Opportunities for collaboration

Quick bit of reflection

10 years of Dublin Core
Looking back
Looking forward

Semantic Web - Many things to many people

elephant

Semantic Web

Data Integration across application, organizational, community boundaries
Reduces the technical and social costs for effective integration of networked data at various scales

How does it work?

Apply power of URIs to concepts of relational data
- Don't say "colour" say <http://example.com/2002/std6#col>
Model real things, not documents or database tables
- People, places, concepts, genes, proteins, etc.

Semantic Web Technologies

Semantic Web foundation specifications RDF, RDF Schema and OWL are W3C Recommendations as of Feb 2004 (press release and testimonials)
Standardization work is underway in Query and Best Practices.
Near-term work planned on Semantic Web Rules.
Goal of moving from a Web of Document to a Web of Data

A Web of Data

XML, RDF, OWL and URIs

Markup language and means for connecting resources

Below the file, text level

At the data level

Semantic Web Standards

Open standards, commercial and open source and tools - technologies for modeling real world things; sharing these models across the Web.
Focus is on Web Evolution
Web Evolution causing a quiet data revolution

Vodafone - Live Mobile Portal

Search application (e.g. ringtone, game, picture) using RDF

better search : page views per download decreased 50%
increased revenue : ringtone up 20% in 2 months

Bringing goods closer to customers increased sales

RDF was key factor in making this possible

Nokia - Semantic Web enabled forum.nokia.com

Nokia

Oracle

Oracle Database 10.2
Native RDF store
Converters / loaders for existing RDF data
RDF Query - An RDF_MATCH function which can be used in SQL to find graph patterns in RDF (similar to SPARQL)
SeeAlso: Over 100 Partners Thoroughly Test and Support Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Semantic Technologies Center

Simile

Simile : data interoperability across distributed individual, community, and enterprise / institutional stores
Personal and collaborative information management
"Pure" data
Facilitate the combination of data and services
Semantic Web Browser

Movie shows in Piggy Bank screenshot thumbnail

Assorted map information screenshot thumbnail

SWOOP

Hypermedia-based Featherweight OWL Ontology Editor
Browser look-feel
Inline editing
Multiple Ontology Support (Browsing, Mapping, Comparison)
impressive debugging capabilities

Wrapping, Enhancing the Existing Web

semweb connected

Web Evolution not Revolution
Exposing data hiding in documents, servers and databases
Machine Processible data on the Web

GRDDL 1

1. Pick a way of expressing data in XHTML, and get an XSLT transformation to RDF; for example:

Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML and dc-extract.xsl
GeoURL markup and grokGeoURL.xsl
RDF Site Summaries in XHTML, using home2rss.xsl

GRDDL 2

2. Make links from your XHTML data to the transformation, using the transformation link type:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
    <title>Some Document</title>
    <link rel="transformation"
       href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/dc-extract/dc-extract.xsl" />
    <meta name="DC.Subject"
       content="ADAM; Simple Search; Index+; prototype" />
    ...
  </head>
  ...
</html>

GRDDL 3

3. Reference the GRDDL profile to make it clear what that transformation link type means:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
    <title>Some Document</title>
    ...

GRDDL XSLT service demo, example

online GRDDL demo service by Dom, Nov 2003.
- check its output with the W3C RDF Validation service
An example home page for Joe Lambda shows DC, GeoURL, RSS, FOAF, and Creative Commons Licenses.

SPARQL

Query language for RDF
Common protocol and interface to expose databases / application data as RDF
"Join the Web"
More information: Data Access working group

SKOS

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
RDF vocabulary to support the declaration / reuse of knowledge organization systems (KOS)
Core
- model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes (thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, etc.)
Work on Mapping and Extensions

Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences

W3C Semantic Web for Life Sciences Workshop, Oct 2004

Too much information - no one can know everything
No one XML Schema can represent everything; increased focus on a common representation framework
Different scales, Different perspectives
The problem of naming
Desire for common, reusable vocabularies in health care and life sciences domain
Need to describe information sharing policies (personal, group, corporate, public)

Draft charter available for review

Connecting the dots / Challenges

DC / RDF
SKOS
FRBR (lite) in RDF
Publication metadata (hubmed, BioMed Central, Alzforum)
Refactoring Education metadata

Observations and Lessons Learned

Data is King - free the data from the application that created it
Enabling more flexible, customized information services / products
The value in "as needed" data integration
Big wins come from many little ones
The power of links - network effect
Things change, plan up front for it
Open-world, open solutions are cost effective

Conclusions

Semantic Web is here
Initial work in exploring the application of both Web Services and Semantic Web has started
More work is needed
You can help!

More Information

Slides are available at http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/0915-semweb-em/
W3C - http://www.w3.org/
Semantic Web Home Page - http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
Me - Eric Miller, em@w3.org