Semantic Web Activity News

范炜 (Fan Wei) has published a Simplified Chinese translations of the SKOS Reference document, under the title “SKOS 简单知识组织系统参考”.

Today W3C announces a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part of W3C's Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it. As an open standard based on Web technology, OWL 2 lowers the cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains. More than a dozen implementations of OWL 2 are already available. The standard consists of 13 documents, of which 4 are instructional.

The W3C Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLS) is pleased to announce the publishing of three Interest Group notes by the Scientific Discourse Task Force:

• SWAN/SIOC: Alignment Between the SWAN and SIOC Ontologies
• Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (SWAN) Ontology
• SIOC, SIOC Types and Health Care and Life Sciences

These notes describe how one can use the Semantic Web to express and integrate scientific data from different domains and from heterogeneous services. It is hoped that they will inspire further contributions to the ongoing work of the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group and its Scientific Discourse Task Force, as well as inspire those in other domains to exploit the Semantic Web.

The W3C SPARQL Working Group published the First Public Working Draft of six SPARQL 1.1 specifications. SPARQL is the query language of the Semantic Web, and SPARQL 1.1 enhances the SPARQL landscape with:

• SPARQL 1.1 Query - Adds support for aggregates, subqueries, projected expressions, and negation to the SPARQL query language.
• SPARQL 1.1 Update - Defines an update language for RDF graphs.
• SPARQL 1.1 Protocol - Defines an abstract interface and HTTP bindings for a protocol to issue SPARQL Query and SPARQL Update statements against a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Service Description - Defines a vocabulary and discovery mechanism for describing the capabilities of a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs - Describes the use of the HTTP protocol for managing named RDF graphs on an HTTP server.
• SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes - Defines conditions under which SPARQL queries can be used with entailment regimes such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.

The HTML Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of HTML+RDFa. RDFa is intended to solve the problem of machine-readable data in HTML documents. RDFa provides a set of HTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. Using RDFa, authors may turn their existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content. This specification defines rules and guidelines for adapting the RDF in XHTML: Syntax and Processing (RDFa) specification for use in the HTML5 and XHTML5 members of the HTML family. The rules defined in this document not only apply to HTML5 documents in non-XML and XML mode, but also to HTML4 documents interpreted through the HTML5 parsing rules.

The W3C Product Modelling Incubator Group has published a report of their work, entitled Product Modelling using Semantic Web Technologies, edited by Michel Böhms, David Leal, Henson Graves, and Kendall Clark. From the abstract of the report:

...definition, storage, exchange and sharing of product data. Product data is information about the structure and behaviour of things that are realized in industrial processes. So principally product data is about things that are manmade, but it can also be about things in the natural world that interact with those industrial processes and/or its resulting products. Typical products would include automobiles, airplanes, buildings, infrastructures, ships and other manmade complex products.

This report describes the role and scope of product data, and initial work in two technical areas:

• Quantities, Units & Scales; and
• Product Structure - the decomposition of wholes in parts and the interconnection relationships between these parts.

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Candidate Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with 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 group has also published a new version of RIF Test Cases, and three new First Public Working Drafts: RIF Overview, RIF Combination with XML data, and OWL 2 RL in RIF. The Working Group asks all developers to send implementation reports, and other comments, to public-rif-comments@w3.org by 29 October 2009.

The mission of the Provenance Incubator Group, is to provide a state-of-the art understanding and develop a roadmap in the area of provenance for Semantic Web technologies, development, and possible standardization. This includes:

• Developing requirements for representing explicit provenance information of Semantic Web resources
• Developing use cases for accessing and reasoning about provenance information
• Identifying the issues in provenance that are a direct concern to the Semantic Web
• Identifying starting points for provenance representations
• Articulating the relationships between provenance on the Semantic Web and ongoing work on trust and provenance in other areas
• Identifying elements of a provenance architecture on the Semantic Web that need and would benefit from Standardization (eg, at the W3C)

The group will be chaired by Yolanda Gil. The charter of the group is publicly available.