SWAD-Europe Deliverable 3.13: Developer Workshop
Report 3 - Introduction to the Semantic Web
[versión
española]
- Project name:
- Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe (SWAD-Europe)
- Project Number:
- IST-2001-34732
- Workpackage name:
- 3 Dissemination and Implementation
- Workpackage description:
- http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/plan/workpackages/live/esw-wp-3
- Deliverable title:
- 3.13 Developer Workshop Report 6
- URI:
- http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/dev_workshop_report_6
- Author:
- Charles McCathieNevile
- Abstract:
- This report summarises the sixth developer workshop, held in madrid
on 13 June 2004. The workshop various aspects of the Semantic Web
development in Spanish.
- STATUS:
- Completed The first draft of this report was
published 15 June 2004. This version $Date:
Sunday 05 September 2004 - 20:36:33$. This report may be updated over
the life of the SWAD-Europe Project to link to new work emerging on the
topics of the workshop.
Contents
Executive Summary
- Introduction
- Background
- Workshop
- Outcomes
Appendix A. Projects and Tools
This workshop brought together Spanish speakers interested in developing
Semantic Web technologies. It was held entirely in Spanish..
The workshop was hosted by LaRed.es, with additional support from
Barrapunto.com. Attendees came from all over Spain, from the four target
communities (open-source and commercial developers, academia and the
government sector).
In addition the discussion was noted live on IRC, so further participation
from Spain and Argentina was made possible.
The workshop had the following outcomes:
- Development of a tutorial for the cwm RDF parser in Spanish
- Introducing a range of Spanish developers to the Semantic Web
- Demonstrating some work that has been done in Spanish
- Inspiring a further workshop on the same topic in South America
- Motivating the use of the Spanish language developers list
Web-Semantica-Ayuda
This report is part of the SWAD-Europe
project Work package 3:
Dissemination and Implementation. It describes the developer workshop
"Introducción a la Web Semántica" held in Madrid, Spain, on 13 June 2004, in
Spanish.
The principal objectives of the workshop were
- Introduce spanish developers to some of the principal ideas and some
tools for the Semantic Web in their own language.
- Present some of the work on the Semantic Web being done in Spanish and
in Spain.
- Motivate more of the spanish developer community in various areas of
work concerning the Semantic Web
There is work done on the Semantic Web in Spain, but much of it takes
place, or is published, only in English. For people interested it is very
difficult to find information available in Spanish. To introduce more members
of the Spanish-speaking development community to the Semanic Web, and to
introduce developers to each other, some members of the Web-Semantica-Ayuda
list suggested a workshop in Spanish. The fact that another SWAD-Europe
workshop was being organised in Madrid made the organisation easy, further
assisted by the generous help of Hispalinux, Lared.es and Barrapunto.com. Within five days of
announcing the workshop the available places were already oversubscribed,
with many people asking to be placed on the waiting list.
Four formal presentations were given in the workshop:
An introduction to RDF, using tools available in spanish (foaf-a-matic,
Hera) to create RDF and cwm to aggregate and query the information. This
presentation was made by Charles McCathieNevile of the SWAD-Europe project
This presentation demonstrated the Annotea and RDF bookmarks work done in
Amaya by José Kahan, a project member, using Redland and Raptor, all
developed as part of the SWAD-Europe project.
This presentation described the use of SKOS, a vocabulary developed as
part of the SWAD-Europe project. It covered a comparison of SKOS with other
thesaurus systems, the process of developing SKOS tools using Jena, and
further development to make thesauri accessible via Web services and similar
frameworks. It was made by José Ramón Peréz Agüera of the Universidad
Complutense in Madrid.
This presentation was made by Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo of the
Fundación Sidar. It discussed the state of the art in image annotation tools
and vocabularies for describin multimedia, and introduced RDFPic Extended, a
tool developed by Vincent Tabard in conjunction with Fundación Sidar, based
on W3C's RDFPic software.
Attendance
The workshop was attended in person by representatives of the following
organisations. The use of IRC allowed further participation from Spain and
Argentina, and others to follow without participating.
- Barrapunto.com
- Fundación Sidar
- Gloobal
- Hispalinux
- Internet Web Serveis, SL
- Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación
- ONCE
- TLDP-ES
- Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- Universidad Complutense de Madrid
- Universidad Naciónal de Educación a Distancia
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
- Universidad de Valencia
- Universidad de Zaragoza
- W3C
- Ximetrix
- XSTO
The ideas, the model and syntax of RDF were introduced to Spanish
developers. A number of projects and
tools were presented in some detail - see Appendix A. This community,
including those who were unabel to be physically present at the workshop,
were introduced to the use of IRC with "chump" a tool often used by the
english-speaking RDF development community to permit real-time collaboration
at a distance.
Since the workshop, the level of discussion on the Web-Semantica-Ayuda
list, an the participation of Spanish speakers in the #rdfig IRC channel have increased
noticeably, both in quantity and in technical quality. From this higher level
of visibility we expect the work of Spanish speaking developers to receive
more exposure and recognition internationally. We expect the increased level
of discussion both within the Spanish speaking developer community, and
between that community and the international community at large, to advance
the technical practice of those developers.
A likely outcome of the workshop is a further series of workshops in
Spanish, both in Spain and in Sout America. We expect these workshops to lead
to a further increase in the availability and visibility of documentation in
Spanish.
This workshop has made a measurable contribution towards those goals,
leading to the production of new introductory material, and resulting in
further discussion within the Spanish-speaking semantic web developer
community in the Web-Semantica-Ayuda list and other widely-read mailing
lists.
A record of the discussion (in
Spanish) is available, which includes comments and notes made by the
participants and other developers.
The evaluations of the workshop suggested that the content was very
appropriate, and the workshop achieved its primary goals. But participants
felt that it would have been better to have a lot more time, allowing for
more in-depth discussion of some interesting issues such as the relationship
between RDF and other technologies deisgned for specific tasks, or how to
choose, create and use vocabularies.
- Amaya
- A browser/editor for the Web, developed as an open-source project led
by W3C and INRIA. It includes an interface for Annotea annotations, and
uses the RDF bookmark vocabulary. The interface can be set to a number
of of languages including English and Spanish.
- Annotea
- An protocol for making annotations about any type of Web content,
using RDF. The Annotea project, financed in part by SWAD-E, has
invluded development of a server, client library code in several
languages, and implementation of a complete user interface in Amaya, as
well as the protocol itself.
- Chump
- A program that can collect comments about something of interest from
an IRC channel, provding a summary page which is more readable than a
complete log of the discussion. It is used heavily by the RDF community
in the #rdfig channel.
- CWM
- An RDF parser developed as an open source project led by Tim
Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly. An introduction
to its use (in Spanish) was developed for and presented at the
workshop.
- EARL
- An RDF vocabulary to describe conformance of a resource to a list of
requirements. An introduction to the code, EARL
by example is available in a number of languages including English
and Spanish.
- FOAF
- An RDF vocabulary to describe people, with various attributes
including whom they know.
- Foaf-a-matic
- A Web page that permits a user to create a FOAF RDF file by filling
in a form. Created by Leigh Dodds, a Spanish translation was made by
Leandro Mariano López
- Foafnaut
- A graphic browser (in SVG) for FOAF information. From Jim Ley
- Foaf
Explorer
- A browser for FOAF information, presenting a large variety of
information in a web page.
- Hera
- A tool that permits a user to evaluate the accessibility of a web
page according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and create
a report using the RDF vocabulary EARL (supplemented with some specific
terms). From the Fundación Sidar, it
has a web-based interface, available in a number of languages including
English and Spanish.
- Jena
- A Java RDF parsing package, developed as an open source project led
by Hewlett Packard, and in part through the SWAD-E project.
- Raptor
- An RDF parser in C, developed as an open source project led by Dave
Beckett, in part through the SWAD-E project.
- RDFPic Extended (mixed site in
english, french and spanish)
- A tool developed by Vincent Tabard, in collaboration with Fundación
Sidar, based on RDFPic from W3C. This version functions with an
infrastructure of Apache/PHP, and is designed to function via a
Web-based interface.
- Redland
- A framework for RDF programing. Developed as an open source project
led by Dave Beckett, in part through the SWAD-E project, it permits a
programmer to have access to RDF parsing (normally through Raptor)
through APIs available in a number of programming languages (e.g. C,
Ruby, PERL, Java)
- SKOS
- An RDF/OWL vocabulary produced as part of the SWAD-E project, for
encoding rich thesauri.
- ximDEX (in
Spanish)
- A commercial content management system, based on XML, currently used
to generate public portals such as the Ministry of Public
Administration in Spain..