Semantic Web Activity News

The W3C OWL Working Group published seven documents related to the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. OWL 2 extends OWL adding new features that users have requested and that software providers are prepared to implement. The documents are:

1. Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
2. Direct Semantics
3. RDF-Based Semantics (First Public Draft)
4. Mapping to RDF Graphs
5. XML Serialization
6. Profiles
7. Conformance and Test Cases (First Public Draft)

The first three documents form the technical core of OWL 2, which has both a traditional "direct" semantics (for OWL DL) and a new "RDF-based" semantics (for OWL Full). Documents 4 and 5 specify two different serializations for OWL ontologies, one based on RDF and one using XML more directly. Document 6 defines useful subsets of OWL which may be easier to implement or may better meet certain performance requirements. Finally, document 7 specifies conformance and will later enumerate the OWL 2 test cases. Five other documents are under development; but they are not yet ready for public review.

The “SPARQL Update” document has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts of Hewlett-Packard, Freie Universität, DERI Galway, Oracle, Talis, Garlik, OpenLink, INRIA, Computas, and Semsol. The document describes an update language for RDF graphs. It uses a syntax derived form SPARQL. Update operations are performed on a collection of graphs in a Graph Store. Operations are provided to change existing RDF graphs as well as create and remove graphs with the Graph Store.

The W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group today published Representing Content in RDF as a First Public Working Draft. This document provides a vocabulary to represent content in RDF, and is flexible for any type of content available on the Web or in local storage media. The Working Group also published an an updated Working Draft of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF, which defines terms to allow HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server to be recorded in RDF. These documents can be used to extend the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, an RDF vocabulary to record test results such as those generated by Web accessibility evaluation tools. They are part of the EARL Specification.

Please note that the deadline to send position papers for the W3C
Workshop on “Semantic Web in Energy Industries; Part I: Oil & Gas” has been extended to 30 September 2008. The new deadline for the acceptance notification is set on the 17th of October 2008.

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group have published the Proposed Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language that can be extracted to produce RDF data. The group has published an implementation report as part of the Candidate Recommendation phase. Comments are welcome through 03 October.

Saltlux, Korea, has just published a SW Use Case and a SW Case Study. The Use Case describes a mobile content recommendation system at Korea Telecom Freetel, that analyzes the user’s use history and provides content recommendation based on, eg, the user’s situational information. The Case Study describes a Metadata Management and Information Retrieval System at the National Archives of Korea, based on a triple store containing over 10 million RDF triples.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Group Note of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). It is intended for the creators and maintainers of vocabularies in RDFS and OWL (vocabulary and ontology are used interchangeably in the context of this specification). It provides step-by-step instructions for publishing vocabularies on the Web, giving example configurations designed to cover the most common cases.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL). Comments are welcome through 03 October. The group has also published an update of the companion SKOS Primer.