Once again, the main idea behind the social network comes from a reversal process. We're dealing with an approach focused on the people (user-centric) and not on the applications allowing us to produce various data (text with blogs, pictures on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc.). Rather than indicate to our contacts the numerous RSS feeds representing our "digital life", we are going to point at a unique address (our OpenID) whereby they will have access to any shared data. Even better, they will be able to add us in their contact list in order to automatically receive our new data (our "lifestreams"). To draw a parallel between an existing tool, adding an RSS feed to an aggregator like Google Reader comes down to adding a contact in our social network. But there is a major difference because this new approach simplifies things a lot while introducing many new fascinating possibilities.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 3 - Social Networks

We're still using Protege, but this time working with the new ALPHA version and getting deeper into concepts.

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semantic weltbild 2.0 wrote a short article about NEPOMUK-KDE, a project whose aim is to bring RDF's resource annotation to the KDE desktop environment. NEPOMUK-KDE is a sub-project of the Semantic-Desktop project Nepomuk which aims to provide a full implementation of the standards and APIs defined in Nepomuk on the KDE desktop. As a sub-project of Nepomuk the two main issues are the maintenance and intensive usage of metadata throughout the desktop and powerful peer-to-peer collaboration techiques. This is accomplished in part by ditching the simplistic, string-based tagging model in favor of using RDF. If only this was for GNOME. Check it out!

To begin with, there is a very simple idea: Websites should themselves indicate their changes to the search engines. I've already touched upon the subject in the previous part of this series, right now search engines have a reversed approach which consists of crawling the Web constantly looking for the slightest modification. Don't you think it's silly? Think about the number of Web pages to visit, imagine the cost to get the lowest frequency between each visit. Consequently, it seems difficult to consider the development of new search engines today. Nevertheless, the advent of the Semantic Web should lead to their multiplication, in a vertical way, while search engines are getting specialized more and more in specific fields.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 2 - Datahubs

The Curse of Knowledge: the more you know, the more difficult it is for you to communicate knowledge. When we know something, we can hardly imagine not knowing it. The more we learn about something, the more it becomes even harder for us to think of not knowing it. It is generally difficult for experts (who know much) to explain their expertise to laymen (who know little) because experts have to try hard to imagine the scenario when they were not experts. This is the Curse of Knowledge.

Continue reading The Curse of Knowledge and the Semantic Web

The 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008) is being held in Tenerife, Spain from June 1 to June 5, 2008. The conference is still in its early organizational stage so a list of speakers has not yet been included, nor has a schedule been set for the presentations. ESWC 2008 will feature a tutorial program, system descriptions and demos, a posters track, a Ph.D. symposium and a number of collocated workshops.

Continue reading ESWC 2008: 5th European Semantic Web Conference

Danny Ayers has updated the RDF Review Vocabulary with a handful of new terms (suggested by ITerating and Revyu, two entities currently deploying this vocabulary), and also made it OWL DL-friendly. He's also set it up as a GRDDL-enabled HTML meta data profile for the hReview microformat. He says still has some debugging to do, and wants to put together a diagram showing the classes and properties.

Continue reading Updates Made to RDF Review Vocabulary

Yihong Ding, contributing author of Semantic Focus, has released a Chinese language version of his Thinking Space blog. For now he'll be translating his existing articles from English to Chinese, but as time goes on he says he may post exclusive articles for his Chinese-speaking audience. If you prefer reading about the Semantic Web in Chinese then this is the blog for you!

The RDF Data Access Working Group has published the following three SPARQL Proposed Recommendations:

SPARQL Query Language for RDF

Defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.

SPARQL Query Results XML Format

Defines an XML format for the variable binding and boolean results formats.

SPARQL Protocol for RDF

Uses WSDL 2.0 to describe an HTTP protocol for conveying SPARQL queries to an SPARQL query processing service and returning the query results to the party that made the request.

Web 3.0: New Opportunities on the Semantic Web is an event being held at the Stanford Graduate School of Business to allow everyone to get together and talk about the exciting issues that lay before us with respect to the future of the Web. The event is being held by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) will take place Tuesday, November 20 from 6:00pm to 8:30pm and will be a panel session where emerging companies in the Semantic Web space present their different approaches to realizing the vision of the Semantic Web. Cost of registration will be $35.00 and last minute tickets will be made available on the 19th of November.

Continue reading Web 3.0: New Opportunities on the Semantic Web (Event)