The W3C Interest Group on eGovernment has just published its first Working Draft: Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web. Only a first draft, but may be of interest for the Semantic Web crowd, look at the separate chapter on Open Government Data…
March 10, 2009
November 14, 2008
Calais Release 4 and the Linking Data cloud…
Just got to this news via Yves’s blog: Reuters’ Open Calais service comes with a new release in January, and this will bind to the Linked Data cloud. To quote the official blog of Reuters:
Release 4 of Calais will be a big deal. In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.
Ie: when analyzing a text, Open Calais will return URIs into DBPedia, Freebase, Musicbrainz… Thereby opening up the possibility for various of applications that would not be possible (or would be fairly complicated) without. One more step to make it possible to reuse all those data on the Web… Yey!
B.t.w.: I write these lines using WordPress and I have Zemanta’s Firefox plugin running to generate the tags. However, as far as I know (I may be wrong!), the Zemanta service does not provide those URI-s yet (they do provide some URI-s in their return format, but I am not sure those are LOD URIs). Maybe some day?
(Thanks to Yves for drawing my attention on this…)
(Note after the original publication of the blog: it seems I was wrong and Zemanta does have a similar feature, see Andraz’ comment.)
April 24, 2008
Semantic Web W3C Track at WWW2008
Yesterday I chaired a Semantic Web session at the W3C Track at WWW2008. Nice turnout (about 100 people), and I had to cut the discussions to keep within schedule, which is always a good sign…
Three presentations, fairly different from one another. Tom Heath and Chris Bizer made a presentation (co-authored with Tim Berners-Lee) on the Linking Open Data project. Real good stuff. Maybe the most impressive part was when Chris flipped through the figures on the “current” status of the linked dataset, starting from a year ago at WWW2007 up to April 2008. And the fact that, actually, we essentially lost track of how many triplets are out there; there are simply too many of those! I also did not know that Tom worked on Revyu by automatically adding information coming from DPBedia to an entry. I really hope that the coming year will see lots of user applications that rely on this huge amount of public RDF data out there…
Raphaël Troncy made a presentation on managing multimedia content on the Semantic Web. The situation today is really a maze with all kinds of standards, semi-standards, etc, on how to describe, annotate, reason about, say, video. Lots of work ahead, both in the Semantic Web area and in others. Think of the fact that we still do not have a generally accepted URI to describe something like an area in an image, or a specific point in time in a video. (There was, actually, a short discussion after the presentation on how some of the current URI schemes fit, or not fit, general Web Architecture…)
Huajun Chen gave an overview on what is happening in the Semantic Web area in China. In two words: a lot. Some of the technologies developed in China are now well-known all around, some of them less. We should realize that there are more Semantic Web related blogs and subscribers to local mailing lists than anywhere else… I think one of the challenges is to bind the various SW communities beyond the boundaries of languages, where Chinese is probably the largest “local” community. I do not have any magic bullet here, but presentations like Huajun’s are important to have…
