Introduction to Semantic Web

Giving meaning to the Semantic Web by Dan Misener, Globe and Mail (May 31) Wonderfully succinct statement about the semantic web: "The bottom line: The Semantic Web means many things to many people, and therein lies the irony. It's an online movement focused on adding meaning, but its own meaning is far from clear." This is a good introduction to "semantic web" of structure and connections. We may never see it in full force as a personal information agent, but the technology supports some services on the web today. "For example, Google recently announced Knowledge Graph, an effort to improve search results by applying semantics. Mr. Giasson points to both Wolfram Alpha and Apple's Siri as well-known services that use semantic approaches."

Thesaurus Management - Semantic Web

This looks interesting - PoolParty, a company in Austria, has developed software for creating and managing a thesaurus. It supports SKOS and can be used to analyze text and do "semantic indexing".

PoolParty is a thesaurus management system and a SKOS editor for the Semantic Web including text analysis functionalities and linked data capabilities. The system helps to build and maintain multilingual thesauri providing a simple user interface and a couple of semantic services. PoolParty can be used to implement semantic search or can be integrated into existing systems like CMS, DMS or Wikis.

There are several screencasts and screenshots to demo the product. Registered users have access to a full demo. As well there is this very useful page on Application Scenarios and Use Cases.

Schemas and vocubalaries

Here are two resources that may help people in using schemas to build taxonomies.

Schemaweb.info/ - " SchemaWeb is a directory of RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages. SchemaWeb is a place for developers and designers working with RDF. It provides a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas to be browsed and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to be used by software agents that wish to obtain real-time schema information whilst processing RDF data. "

Vocab.org/ - " A URI space for vocabularies"

Thanks to SLA Taxonomy Wiki

OpenCalais is amazing

Learn About and Try OpenCalais (a Free Service from Thomson Reuters), ResourceShelf (Nov 6)

OpenCalais is making a dent in use of semantic technology to extract entities and topics from text.

"In a nutshell, OpenCalais uses semantic technology and natural language processing to analyze text and add metadata by drawing out entities from documents, blog posts, news stories, etc. In some cases, ths type of data can identify or help identify relationships between people, businesses, etc."

This post gives an example of what it can do, and points to the OpenCalais viewerbox where we can try it for ourselves - take a substantial story from an online news site and see the types of data that Calais can extract and organize.

Explore to see the power of the tool. Will we need taxonomies if we have tools like OpenCalais?

Further, we can have this at our fingertips for content we follow with Feedly, a Firefox plugin.

Feed(ly)ing The Enterprise, by Jennifer Zaino, Semantic Web (Nov 9)

"For one thing, it’s the semantic technology embedded within Feedly, which uses the OpenCalais web service to get a clean representation of metadata behind content. That gives power to enterprise users such as marketing professionals, who might be subscribed to various blogs and feeds and services and different content that’s relevant to their brand."

Semantic Web and the work of librarians

Can Librarians Be Put Directly Onto the Semantic Web? by Eric Hellman, go to Hellman (Aug 4, 2009)

What does semantic web mean to librarians? It may mean moving away from an orientation to the human user when creating metadata, to constructing for the machine.

"In many respects, the most important question for the library world in examining semantic web technologies is whether librarians can successfully transform their expertise in working with metadata into expertise in working with ontologies or models of knowledge. Whereas traditional library metadata has always been focused on helping humans find and make use of information, semantic web ontologies are focused on helping machines find and make use of information. Traditional library metadata is meant to be seen and acted on by humans, and as such has always been an uncomfortable match with relational database technology. Semantic web ontologies, in contrast, are meant to make metadata meaningful and actionable for machines. An ontology is thus a sort of computer program, and the effort of making an RDF schema is the first step of telling a computer how to process a type of information."

Evolution of the Web to Web 3.0

Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English (Presentations) from Digital Inspiration (May 2009)

This is brilliant - Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 explained in a single slide of points, some text, and 5 excellent slide presentations. As the note on the page explains, the two about the red stamp describe the semantic aspects and workings very clearly.

Good Look at Semantic Web

Jean Graef of the Montague Institute answers the question, Where will semantic content come from? in terms we can begin to understand.

"Semantic web" is usually a very theoretical idea of linking up data in magical ways. In this posting, we get a real-life example drawn from a mortgage refinance application of how a semantic infrastructure would work.

Also raised here is the matter of trust. How will we know to trust the information that is brought together through a semantic infrastructure?

Jean Graef concludes: "The technology piece of the infrastructure is almost ready; it's the semantic content and editorial oversight that's missing.

Web 3.0 a matter of restructuring

Web 3.0: The Next Step for the Internet by Michael Baumann, Information Today (May 2009) via Allbusiness.com

Web 3.0, says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, is going to be about restructuring the web.

"Web 3.0 will usher in a revolution in the construction of the internet itself. In the third decade of the Web, the focus is going back to the back end and we're focusing on upgrading the infrastructure of the Web again."

"When an application sees a page on the Web today it doesn't really know what to do with it," Spivack says. "But as we add more of this open standard metadata to the Web, it makes the Web machine understandable. Also, as applications get smarter because they can understand language and know what words mean, that also adds meaning and structure to the Web."

Text Mining for Meaning

Many are pointing to the emergence of a Web 3.0 that brings together Web 2.0 collaborative qualities with a semantic web of connections and semantic tools for understanding.

Nstein, the digital publishing technologies company, held a webinar titled From Metadata to Meaning: Intelligence in the Semantic Era on June 25, 2009, moderated by Diane Burley.

Seth Grimes of Alta Plana presented the case of an exploding digital universe where individuals are creating 70% of the content. Search based on keyword matching won't be sufficient. The next generation of tools must make sense of the data to deliver meaningful answers. Text mining combined with semantic analysis is one direction. Google has some new capability at picking out data and its context - eg the employment data for a US state. Newssift from the Financial Times shows more capability at identifying organizations, places, people and topical themes in its aggregation of news. Grimes noted that semantically enriched content, linked data, context sensitivity, and location awareness are now recurring themes. Text mining / analytics is enabling Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web.

For designers and users this means:

• Automated content categorization and classification.
• Text augmentation: metadata generation, content tagging.
• Information extraction to databases.
• Exploratory analysis and visualization.

Jean-Michel Texier, Chief Technology Officer at Nstein Technologies, described Nstein modules for mining and analyzing data - essentially to make sense of vast stores of text by extracting concepts, identifying and normalizing entities, categorizing content, extracting relevant sentences, analyzing sentiment, and finding similar content.

The presentation is available in PDF on the dowload section of the Nstein website: http://www.nstein.com/en/downloads.php?sourceId=236 - registration required.

Semantic Metadata

Semantic Metadata & Sagacious Serendipty by Diane Burley, Silicon Valet (June 2009)

Digital media consultant, Diane Burley, says that metadata is the key to creating websites that enable discovery and provide user satisfaction. But she doesn't mean that run-of-the-mill metadata - date, author, format etc - administrative metadata, but semantic metadata.

"The academics at Kent State call it descriptive metadata, while the folks at Nstein prefer to call it semantic metadata (semdata??). It is metadata that is generated using a multi-faceted approach of computational and linguistic analysis. It not only extracts meaning from documents – but also embeds the synonyms, summary, categories, even the tone, in order to create a linguistic fingerprint. This linguistic fingerprint can then be matched against any other linguistic fingerprint – to find like pieces of content."

Semantic Web Blend

A Smarter Web - New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0." By John Borland, MIT Technology Review (March 2007)

The Semantic Web - the structure that will enable us to see connections between databases and gather information with less effort - is getting closer. This article describes the objectives, the progress, the players in making smarter tools for organizing and finding information. Ontologies are involved as are user-generated tagsonomies.

"The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent "Web 3.0.""

The writer traces the history to organize information from Melvil Dewey's days, through the early days of directories on the Web, and the increasing acceptance of using metadata to describe information objects.

Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, has been one of the contributors to furthering "semantic web" enabling technologies.

Meanwhile, social tagging has been gaining acceptance imposing a "grassroots order" on collections.

"No one knows what organizational technique will ultimately prevail. But what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework."

Freebase for Structured Content

Freebase.com might be the forerunner of the semantic web that has long been talked about. Ivor Tossell at the Globe and Mail described in A web that can read itself may be in our future (Sept 10)

"Freebase, like Wikipedia, is an open encyclopedia that most anyone can edit. But alongside each free-form article in Freebase, there are database fields for relevant hard data points. If the article is about a movie, you'll find fields for its release date, director, producer, screenwriters and so on. If the article is about a city, it will have fields for the city's population and location. If the article is about an artist, it will have a field for every one of that artist's works."

Freebase is an open project for building structured data applications using types and defined properties. Film will have one set or properties, geographic places another set. It will support complex queries.

From the FAQ - "Finally, while information in Freebase appears to be structured much like a conventional database, it’s actually built on a system that allows any user to contribute to the schemas—or frameworks—that hold the data. This wiki-like approach to structuring information lets many people organize the database without formal, centralized planning. And it lets subject experts who don’t have database expertise find one another, and then build and maintain the data in their domain of interest."

Understanding OWL

Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Semantic Web by Goutam Kumar Saha, Ubiquity Volume 8 Issue 35 (Sept 10, 2007)

In this ACM IT magazine article, Saha describes the web ontology language (OWL) which is a principal part of enabling a "semantic web". Has illustrations, examples and explanations of code.

"Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language for defining and instantiating web ontologies (a W3C Recommendation). OWL ontology includes description of classes, properties and their instances. OWL is used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms. Such representation of terms and their interrelationships is called ontology. OWL has facilities for
expressing meaning and semantics and the ability to represent machine interpretable content on the Web. OWL is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. This is used for knowledge representation and also is useful to derive logical consequences from OWL formal semantics."