Semantic Technology Conference 2009 Day One: first impressions

The 2009 edition of the Semantic Technology Conference is just started today with a Code Camp and two introductory key notes by Dave Comb and Mark Greaves. Looking at the attendance numbers and at the tweets with the #semtech2009 hashtag it seems that this event will be an exiting moment for the whole Semantic Web community.

The Code camp ended with some good news regarding Freebase and OpenCalais plus an unexpected and positive interest around the growing adoption of the Adobe Flex technology for ontology visualization purposes. This first and introductory code camp has been followed by a welcoming talk by Dave Comb from Semantic Arts and the whole day ended by an interesting presentation by Mark Greaves named “The Evolving Semantic Web: From Military Technology to Venture Capital”.

Numbers, mood and general trends gathered from this first day could be better summarized leaving the scene to the actor of this first day:

“the cost of semantic data creation is going to zero - the size of semantic data is going to web-scale” - Mark Greaves

“database linkage means that LOD will soon be impossible to count except via order of magnitude” - Mark Greaves

“Gartner says that by 2012 70% of web pages will be augmented by some semantic annotation” - Dave Comb

It should also be noticed how the wave of such EU founded projects related to the Semantic Web could influence the whole conference. In fact, on Tuesday there will be an entire session dedicated to such European efforts: in that session the NoTube project, where we are deeply involved, will be presented by its scientific coordinator.

Finally, our presentation is scheduled on Wednesday, where we will be pleased to show you our “99ways to build your own Web”, the first of a new breed of applications based on the Semantic Web technologies we are currently working on.

Looking forward to meet you at the conference

Asemantics’ brand new OAuth Java Library

If you’re looking for an answer to the question “What’s OAuth?” the official OAuth website[1] says:

“An open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications”

If you’re interested enough in it, follow the official OAuth 1.0 specification[2].

We started using OAuth with the official base Java implementation[3] , and even if it works fine - we were able to successfully realize a demo application using it - we felt there were some shortcomings in the distribution method and in the design of the overall library.

Starting from this consideration, this small community aimed to develop a robust, lightweight and zero-dependencies Java framework to realize a solid OAuth-based applications; using our framework we’ve been developed a set of demos, take a look at them[4]!

At the end of the day, we started appreciating our small work, and so we decided to “donate” it to the OpenSource community.

This isn’t to blame the original work. We greatly respect the volunteer developers who gave birth to the library, so allowing us to improve our knowledge about OAuth (thanks!), and our first thought was to join the community to help in improving the existing library. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time which we don’t have, and we had to realize a lot of projects… so, since we work together and we meet every day, we chose to start our own implementation.

We really hope you like the way we have realized it, and hope you’ll join us soon in the development process!

About Asemantics: a company developing Semantic Web technologies and building “Worldwide Information Integration” solutions. Asemantics is a European company with offices in Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and United Kingdom.

[1] http://oauth.net/

[2] http://oauth.net/core/1.0/

[3] http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/java/

[4] http://oauth.asemantics.com

Semantic Web for European Security

A team lead by ESG - Elektroniksystem und Logistik GmbH, Munich, and composed, among others, of Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory, German Aerospace Center, and Joint Research Center, has been awarded by the European Commission a project for the “GEOCREW Study on Crisis Management and Situation Awareness Centre”. The project is a supporting action in the first call for the new European security research program [1].

@semantics contributes to GEOCREW with the “Information Integration Concept” workpackage. The approach taken by @semantics is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [2] as the basic layer of the Semantic Web. This open Web standard, combined with advanced Web and encryption techniques can be used to build flexible cooperation models, combine public information with commercial and classified data and build software systems which can be easily adapted to different threats.

About @semantics: a start-up company developing
basic Semantic Web technologies and building “Worldwide Information Integration” solutions. @semantics is a European company with offices in Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and United Kingdom.

[1] Enhancement of the European industrial potential in the field of Security Research 2004-2006

[2] Resource Description Framework (RDF), World-Wide-Web Consortium.

Libby Miller Joins @semantics

Libby Miller strengthes the team at @semantics as partner and Chief Research Officer. She will focus on the research programs and help apply leading edge technologies to our customer solutions.

Libby was formerly at the Institute for Learning and Research
Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol, where she helped run the
SWAD-Europe project. She is also “co-conspirator” of the FOAF project with Dan Brickley.

She has been part of the Semantic Web Communtiy from the begining on a wide range of topics such as such as calendaring, query, vocabulary developement and community building.
Libby will continue her pivotal role within the the W3C and RDF communities with the full support of @semantics.

About Libby Miller:
Libby earned a BA at Oxford University and a
M.Sc and Ph.D from University of Bristol.

About @semantics: a start-up company with offices in Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and United Kingdom. The company vision is an Open RDF Platform as a base for information integration solutions for enterprise, governmental and aerospace applications.

Profium, Asemantics and HP Laboratories initiate SPARQL4J Open Source effort

(Espoo, 11.1.2005). Profium, ASemantics and HP Laboratories have initiated an open source effort to provide Java programmers with a JDBC driver to access SPARQL-enabled metadata repositories.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is in the process of developing the
SPARQL query language and protocol for Resource Description Framework
(RDF) based metadata repositories. The Data Access Working Group (DAWG)
has already delivered first working drafts of the requirements, uses
cases and the query language itself.

A SourceForge-hosted Open Source initiative starts with the development
of portable JDBC driver that will be ready by the time the working group
finishes its work in 2005.

Meet Friends of a Friend - FoaF Camp is a Go!

It’s a go - Together with Libby and DanBri, and hopefully some more people form the community, we’ll be organizing the first FoaF Camp! A social
, technical and above all Fun gathering of Friends, Friend of Friends and more Friends.

So 19 and 20th of August (a Thursday and Friday) - Enschede, The Netherlands (easy to reach from Schiphol and FMO airport).

We sort of expect to pattern it on the sort of Hack-a-Ton style events the *BSD and Apache.org crowd has had in the past - not too much of agenda; plenty of time for talking, chatting - but enough of an infstruc
ture to tackle some long standing puzzles, do som cool code, deep integration.

The sky is the limit !

Hope to see you there !

Alberto, David, Zac and Dirk-Willem.

A naming mechanism for the RDF model

Asemantics is holding a presentation at the Developers Day at the WWW2004 conference in New York.

W3C DAWG kick-off meeting

On the 22nd and 23rd of April 2004 Asemantics hosted the kick-off meeting for the W3C Data Access Working Group (DAWG) in Leiden, The Netherlands.

See Asemantics page about logistics and location of the meeting together with the W3C meeting page; with the agenda and the list of participants.

Asemantics presented a short intro to RDQL title “RDQL: an implementation experience” as implemented into their RDFStore RDF toolkit. Slides are available in HTML as well as PDF.

Some pictures from the meeting are also available.

WMS and RDF - For fun and foaf !

At @Semantics we’ve long been playing with Web Mapping Servers. Recently we’ve connected them to the world of RDF, RDQL
and FoaF. Read a head for an explanation - or simply jump to the demo

So Web Mapping Servers (WMS) are basically web servers which generate an image of some geographic area or ‘feature’ based on some standard info in the URL. The structure of this URL is defined by the open gis consortsum. Fields in the URL allow for things like selecting specifc regions regions or styles.

Now in the GIS world people think in ‘Layers’ and ‘Features’ - which really are just images which are overlayed on top of each other; each containing something specific; e.g. roads, rivers, a landmask. And when
stacked together they make up a pretty map.

Layers generally have names; like ‘rivers’ or ‘rabbit-counts’. Give this example a spin to get an idea of the concept - you can switch layers on and off. At this point you may want to take note - do a view-source - of the fact that some of the data actually comes from a different server ran by TSA rather than from us. In fact - your browser fetches their layers (e.g. the rivers) directly from their WMS server without even touching our WMS server. WMS servers of the wolrd unite - Federated
Fusion in action!

Recently we created a bit of an unusual deviation (which kind of breaks the WMS/1.1 specification as it makes the ‘layer’ non deterministic and no longer pre-defines it in the Capabilities file) by allowing an ‘RDQL’ query as a layer name.

RDQL is a query language for RDF - and the basis of what we call the semantic web.

.
So what happens is that we define a layer as an RDQL query - i.e. some query which returns the things to plot on the map (and their positions) - and then dynamically generate the map.

Now one of the very neat thing is that in RDQL you can specify the data soruce as a URI - and it can point to any valid RDF source. Including a file on your site.

Hence you now have a map plotting server which can plot your maps - and best of all; the result is a URI which you simply can include in your web page.

Give it a spin at http://demo.asemantics.com/biz/swad-e/rdqlplot.pl.

And once you are done - set up your own foaf - add your foaf url to the database -or- use the above url to create a nice map of yourself in your own environment.

RDFStore data model revealed

Indexing and retrieving Semantic Web resources: the RDFStore model
A. Reggiori, DW van Gulik, Z. Bjelogrlic

Presentation in HTML (see also RDF description of it).

Presented today at SWAD-Europe Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and Retrieval13-14 November 2003, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Nearby see also cool dirkx WMS+RDF+RDQL (RDQLPlotter cool demos

See also misc pictures from Libby Miller of the workshop 1 and 2.