Rdf News & Articles

The W3C (news, site) has been busy. They've released seven documents related to HTML, one of which is of interest to anyone working with HTML and another to anyone involved with the semantic web.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

You can't afford to ignore the issue of Digital Asset Management, or DAM. It's more than a fun acronym. Solid DAM can make your business more efficient. Poor DAM can result in waste, confusion and many lost opportunities.

Researchers with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have thrown themselves head over heels into the semantic web. At this year's 8th International Semantic Web Conference, they presented a paper (download the PDF) focused on the problem of automatically generating the metadata that many semantic web functionalities rely on. 

Talking about RDF closures can cause eyelids to flutter, but the RPI folks aren't living in some theoretical world. They've been digging hard into large, public data sets and have learned some important lessons about making data more useful. Come join us for a closer look.

Without complex decision trees helping computers determine what pieces of text relate to what, it's nearly impossible to make use of the wealth of data available on the web.

In the case where you're only interested in people reading your pages, that's fine. But what if you want other sites to access and use the data you're offering with a full understanding of the context? We're one step closer to a standard that defines exactly how to make this clear.

For months now we've been talking about RDFa and how this proposed standard leads toward the semantic web. Recently, this vision took a step further toward reality.

On September 4th, the President took another important step toward a more open and transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records.

Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of their necessarily confidential nature, the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour or to conduct business will be released. As historic as the President’s announcement is, it is also a good illustration of what is missing from the administration’s technology infrastructure plan -- a coordinated approach to providing data standards.

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.

The World Wide Web Consortium's OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview." Go ahead. Grab a dictionary. We'll wait.

This document is the first in an exciting thirteen volume escapade through the syntaxes, sub-languages, along with other details behind OWL 2 and its differences from OWL 1.

Click over to your preferred search engine and type “global warming,” hit enter and wait for the faint tang of smoke curling up from your processor. What’s that? Six billion hits! Let’s get sophisticated and try “global warming” and “Al Gore”. Oh, wait. Google just sent you an email threatening legal action if  you keep instigating "insanely vague" searches.

If you’re a scientist, attempting environmental studies with a focus on atmospheric phenomena, and you type "red tide," it doesn’t really help to see links to redheads.com. In fact, it’s a distraction you don’t need.

This is when you may need Noesis, a new semantic web search engine developed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a promising addition to scientific research.

When we talk about the Semantic Web we mean more meta-information hidden in the page code, but derived from the content itself, with the aim of letting Web services and search engines know exactly what’s there without having to guess from keywords and tags. XML is one format which can structure content to contain more classification material. RDF is the preferred data model used, which splits content into entities and relationships, and the RDF model most usually utilizes XML to structure content.

As the usage of XML as the primary representation format within a content management system proliferates, the discussion revolves around how to transform said XML into a human readable format.

And what about the machines? Who is looking out for them when it comes time to consume data in a custom XML format?

Here’s an opportunity to contribute to the shape of linguistic history in the Web world. The fine folk of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) inform us that the RDF Data Access Working Group is conducting its third Last Call Working Draft (take a breath) for SPARQL Query Language for RDF. Unless you’re banking on a fourth Last Call, get involved and quickly to cement your opinion on the mutable ‘net.

Twelve years of content management research is now free and they've launched a CMS business & technology blog.

The Gilbane Report announced today that it has made all Gilbane Reports available free of charge at www.gilbane.com, and that there will no longer be a charge for subscriptions.

In parallel a new Gilbane Weblog was announced. It will will provide interactive commentary on the information technology market, technology, and trends that the Gilbane Report is known for including content management, XML, document management, enterprise search, enterprise information integration, digital asset management, and others.