Testimonials for W3C's Semantic Web Recommendations - RDF and OWL
These testimonials are in support of W3C's
Semantic Web Recommendations - RDF and OWL .
As the leading
provider of content creation tools to help people communicate better, adding
intelligence to media via metadata was integral to our strategy. We developed
Adobe XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) based on RDF, because it provided a
flexible and interoperable framework for fostering the capture, preservation,
and interchange of metadata across digital media and workflows. The Adobe
Creative Suite provides a design platform that enables creative professional
to create information rich assets powered by XMP that can be more effectively
repurposed and consumed across multiple media and diverse domains.
-- David Burkett, Director of Product Management,
Adobe Systems
Aduna B.V., located in
Amersfoort, The Netherlands, http://aduna.biz/, is very pleased to see both
RDF and OWL become W3C recommendations. For a company at the forefront of the
developing products based on Semantic Web technology, stable and
well-engineered language standards are crucial for our development work, for
our products and for our customers. Our current products such as the Sesame
platform for storing and querying meta-data heavily exploits the open
framework that RDF provides, and we expect to move to the use of OWL in the
future. We will continue to support the open standards defined by W3C by our
continued development of both commercial and open source software based on
these standards.
-- Martien van Steenbergen, CEO , Aduna
BV
The Semantic Web is the
representation of data on the World Wide Web. It gives information a
well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in
cooperation. Being committed to open standards, AGFA actively participates in
the Semantic Web Activity and is very glad to see RDF and OWL as a W3C
Recommendation. They are great, for instance, to categorize medical images
and their related data.
-- Jos De Roo, RDFCore and WebOnt WG member, AGFA
Gevaert N.V.
Boeing is a member of the
W3C and is an early adopter of RDF, OWL and related Semantic Web
technologies. Boeing has a number of projects exploring semantics-based
applications in various areas including information and application
integration and interoperability, publish/subscribe, knowledge management and
network centric operations. These technologies are expected to have a strong
impact on future Boeing programs. Ontologies have become fairly widespread in
their use and automated reasoning tools are becoming mature. The time is ripe
for standards in this area, and for widespread tool support from
vendors.
-- James L. Phillips, Director, Mathematics and
Computing Technology, Boeing Phantom Works
Brandsoft’s product offerings
are one of the first commercial implementations of Semantic Web components,
mainly RDF. Our belief is that enterprises that standardize on a common
metadata framework, like RDF, will gain significant value, agility, and
substantial cost reduction. They will also benefit from the ability to
provide value added services and applications within their extended
enterprise community (employees, customers, partners, etc.). As a result of
using RDF, Brandsoft has developed a standards based platform with the
ability to integrate the various tools needed to: Create, manage and reuse
content; Publishing capabilities for differing languages, media, and devices;
Establish relationships between people, processes, and systems.
-- Frank Careccia, Vice President – Engineering
and CTO, Brandsoft, Inc.
The University of Bristol is
delighted to see the publication of the W3C RDF and OWL Recommendations. The
University is a strong supporter of open standards and a long-term
participant in the RDF work and considers the Semantic Web as important in
developing advanced learning and research technologies for education.
Successful RDF-based projects at the University include representing metadata
schemas, describing thesauri, events and calendaring, syndicating news, web
site annotation and trust and smarter web searching for digital libraries.
The University intends to continue developing projects, software and services
based on this work.
-- Alison Allden, Director, Institute for Learning
and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol
The efforts of
Creative Commons to encourage permitted sharing and reuse of works are
greatly enhanced by the availability and continued development of RDF, which
serves as the machine-readable layer for our "some rights reserved" licenses.
One year after launch there are over one million Creative Commons-licensed
works published on the web, supported by RDF-aware blog, browser, graphics,
music, publishing, search and validation applications and services. The
upcoming new and revised components of the RDF specification suite will
provide a great boost to the understanding and adoption of RDF, and thus our
work to cultivate an ecology of Creative Commons-aware software.
-- Mike Linksvayer, CTO, Creative
Commons
The DARPA Agent Markup
Language (DAML) program is pleased to endorse the OWL Web Ontology Language
produced by the W3C Web Ontology Working Group based on the DAML+OIL language
developed by the DAML program and its European Union collaborators. We view
OWL as a major advancement for the Semantic Web, and have been using it
extensively as part of our on-going work to develop Semantic Web tools,
rules, and services. We look forward to the wide scale deployment of OWL on
the World Wide Web.
-- Mark Greaves, Program Manager, Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, U.S. Department of Defense
Fujitsu Laboratories
of America - College Park is currently using OWL as an integral part of our
work on "Task Computing." Task Computing is a novel integration of the
Semantic Web with Web Services to provide users with easier ways of achieving
complicated goals in mobile and/or ubiquitous computing environments.
Ontologies defined in OWL give us a powerful mechanism for reasoning about
the composition of heterogeneous services and the use of Web Services lets us
access real devices and displays. Together they enable new and rich forms of
interaction between users and their computing environment. The
standardization of OWL and RDF will facilitate the acceptance of innovative
software methods such as Task Computing.
-- Dr. Kazuhiro Matsuo, Senior Vice President and
General Manager, Fujitsu Laboratories of America
HP actively supports the
development of the Semantic Web and welcomes the new RDF and OWL
Recommendations. HP's Semantic Web developers' framework, Jena,
(http://jena.sourceforge.net/) is an open-source, freely available,
implementation of both Recommendations, with a large and active developer
community. We look forward to the Web-scale machine integration of knowledge
and information that these new Recommendations support.
-- Per-Kristian Halvorsen, Vice-President and
Center Director, Solutions and Services Research Center, HP
Laboratories
IBM has a history of
using progressive research to deliver business value today and in the future.
Our research work with the Semantic Web has the potential to open the
Internet to even more powerful applications. Within IBM we have many active
research projects working with both RDF and OWL. Our first public Semantic
Web project, SnoBase, released on AlphaWorks, is a framework for loading
ontologies from files and using the Internet for locally creating, modifying,
querying, and storing ontologies. It provides a mechanism for querying
ontologies and an easy-to-use programming interface for interacting with
vocabularies of standard ontology specification languages including RDF, RDF
Schema, and OWL. SnoBase can help a broad range of business applications that
need knowledge sharing and reuse as well as information search and navigation
by using reasoning within a generic management environment.
-- Alfred Z. Spector, vice president, Services and
Software, IBM Research
INRIA is pleased to
see the publication of OWL and RDF as W3C Recommendations. They will provide
standard and stable grounds for our developments on searching Web resources -
through the CORESE search engine - and on adapting knowledge sources -
through the Transmorpher transformation engine and alignment tools. INRIA
already takes advantage of available API for OWL and RDF, and expects these
developments to boost the Semantic Web deployment.
-- Gérard Giraudon, Director for Development and
Industrial Relations, INRIA
The Maryland Information and
Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the University of Maryland focuses on
helping to speed up the transition of research into practice by partnering
with industrial and/or government teams in projects focused on advanced
technology deployment. The Semantic Web was identified by our lab as a
priority area for this transition, and we are working with a diverse set of
partners in bringing this important technology into wider practice. The MIND
Laboratory is proud to have co-chaired the Web Ontology Working Group and
believes OWL will be an important language in bringing the Semantic Web to
its full potential.
-- Jim Hendler, Director of Semantic Web and Agent
Technologies, MIND Laboratory, University of Maryland
The use of ontologies
is a key requirement for realizing the ubiquitous computing vision.
Ontologies defined in the Web Ontology Language OWL can help ubiquitous and
pervasive computer systems to share information and knowledge, reason about
their environment and interoperate. The Semantic Web in UbiComp Special
Interest Group is an international group of researchers from academia and
industry that is using OWL for pervasive computing applications and defining
ontology-driven use cases demonstrating aspects of the ubiquitous computing
vision.
-- Harry Chen, Department of Computer Science
& Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore
County
McDonald Bradley, Inc.
(MBI) is leveraging the expressiveness and flexibility of the Resource
Description Framework (RDF) today in its support of many Department of
Defense and Intelligence Community customers. Specifically, the RDF model was
a core design feature of the DOD Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS)
Schema. RDF achieving the status of W3C Recommendation will increase the
number of tools while stabilizing their maturity and features. This will
enable MBI to better deliver robust Semantic Web applications to its
customers as they move towards Net-Centric applications.
-- Michael C. Daconta, Chief Scientist, Advanced
Programs Group, MBI
Mondeca is happy to welcome
the advancement of OWL to W3C recommendation. Always eager to make its
technology conformant to the widest range of semantic standards, the company
has started to use OWL since mid-2003 in customers applications, to describe
and set up knowledge models in its ontology-driven knowledge management
platform, ITM.
ITM ontology layer was beforehand specified using proprietary internal
representation. Using OWL provides ITM with new capacity to describe it in a
standard and interoperable format, to re-use customer-defined or public
domain ontologies, and paves the way to future developments integrating the
power of inference tools.
-- Bernard Vatant, Senior Consultant, Knowledge
Engineering, Mondeca
RDF gives us a data model for
describing information organization structures (metadata) for collections of
networked information. Mozilla uses it as a standard way to represent the
many different structures we use to organize the various kinds of information
we handles --- from bookmarks and email folders to address books and web
services. RDF remains important on the browser side not only because of these
current uses but also because of developing trends such as web logs and news
feeds that are based on RDF. This ability to deal with meta-data independent
of the protocols and formats associated with the data is essential in moving
the web forward.
-- Ben Goodger, Lead Engineer, Mozilla Firebird,
The Mozilla Foundation
Network Inference
congratulates the co-chairs and members of the W3C's Web-Ontology (WebOnt)
Working Group for their outstanding work on OWL. OWL is a core component in
building the semantic web, and in delivering the means for true machine
interoperation. OWL is central to the solutions that Network Inference is
fielding with enterprises today. The quality of the Working Group's members,
activities and outputs provide OWL with robustness and integrity, and instill
the level of confidence in the language which is required for wide adoption.
Network Inference is committed to continuing to active contributions to W3C's
efforts in this area.
-- Jack Berkowitz, Vice President, Engineering,
Network Inference (Holdings) Ltd
Nokia congratulates the
W3C on the promotion of the new RDF and OWL specifications to full
recommendations, which are expected to provide a solid foundation for the
development of the Semantic Web. Having participated actively in both the RDF
Core and Web Ontology Working Groups since their inception, Nokia is well
aware of the enormous effort that has gone into this work, and applauds the
hard-earned success of the Working Group members.
-- Timo Poikolainen, Vice President of Marketing,
Technology Platforms, Nokia
Profium is pleased to see updated RDF
specifications reach recommendation status with W3C. Profium has been
promoting the use of Semantic Web technologies with its flagship product
Semantic Information Router (SIR) since its introduction in April 2001.
Profium sees the power of RDF and OWL best unleashed in the context of portal
solutions that ask for metadata repositories that can index both content and
service descriptions.
-- Janne Saarela, Managing Director, Profium
Ltd.
Semaview understands the
immense value of the emerging Semantic Web and currently provides RDF
versions of every calendar published onto the eventSherpa Network. As more
semantic islands are created and connected, using RDF and OWL, new and
exciting technology services will be created. Semaview believes that
innovation will flourish with the birth of this truly intelligent Internet
based on the W3C's Semantic Web work.
--Paul Cowles, VP, Development and Operations,
Semaview, Inc.
The University of
Southampton and the Advanced Knowledge Technologies interdisciplinary
research collaboration (AKT IRC) enthusiastically endorse the W3C Resource
Description Framework recommendations. The RDF suite of specifications are
fundamentally important to the success of the W3C's Semantic Web initiative.
RDF provides a common framework for the expression of metadata and metadata
schemata. Such metadata support the semantic annotation of Web content and
services, which underpin knowledge integration and exchange. A number of
leading research projects within the University and AKT IRC are making
extensive use of RDF, including our scalable open-source RDF repository
software, 3store.
The University of Southampton and the Advanced Knowledge Technologies
interdisciplinary research collaboration (AKT IRC) enthusiastically endorse
the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language recommendation, a key specification in the
W3C's Semantic Web initiative. OWL permits the definition of sophisticated
ontologies, a fundamental requirement in the integration of heterogeneous
information content. OWL ontologies will also be important for the
characterization of interoperable services for knowledge-intensive processing
on the Web. Research on next-generation products and services within the
University and AKT IRC is incorporating OWL as standard.
-- Professor Nigel Shadbolt (Director), Professor
David De Roure (Head of Grid and Pervasive Computing), and Dr Nicholas
Gibbins, AKT IRC, University of Southampton
Sun
Microsystems, a member of the W3C and the Web Ontology Working Group, wishes
to congratulate the co-chairs and members of the W3C working groups on the
successful publication of the RDF and OWL recommendations. Sun's own internal
enterprise ontology management solution is based on RDF and associated
Semantic Web technologies. RDF provides Sun with the foundation for superior
knowledge aggregation and application integration.
-- Lew Tucker, V.P. Internet Services, Sun
Microsystems, Inc.
TopQuadrant is encouraged
by today’s announcement and strongly supports W3C's standardization of OWL.
Our Government clients understand that the demands of e-Government solutions,
such as Federal Enterprise Architecture, digital preservation (NARA) and
aerospace programs (NASA) go beyond the current capabilities of XML. They
realize that semantic technologies are essential and, in particular, that OWL
is critically important for consistent and flexible enterprise data
integration. In response to strong interest expressed by our clients,
TopQuadrant offers a continuing program of Briefings and Workshops on
Semantic Technologies that showcase the use of RDF(S) and OWL.
-- Robert Coyne, President, TopQuadrant
About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]
The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing
common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.
It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided
by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide
Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample applications
to demonstrate use of new technology. To date, nearly 400 organizations are
Members of the
Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/