AndyL's Blog

Three weeks ago a group of Semantic Web enthusiasts and representatives from various Austrian organisations met in Vienna to discuss a possible future initiative towards Open Government Linked Data similar to data.gov.uk, data.gov (US) and initiatives currently starting up across Europe.

Just finished the promised patch for Joseki, which integrates RDFStats and creates statistics for loaded datasets. I also finished the semwiq-endpoint package which is based on the patched Joseki. An endpoint is available at: http://ramses.faw.uni-linz.ac.at:8900/

It demonstrates:

Drupal says, RDFStats had been released 46 weeks and 3 days ago now... Well, many things changed since the first release. For about two years now I've been evaluating different approaches concerning information integration with Semantic Technologies and playing around, implementing my own stuff.

The current tools I'm about to contribute are the following:

Released spreadsheet-to-RDF wrapper XLWrap and XLWrap-Server, which can be used to:

• publish information stored in spreadsheets
• semantically integrate multiple spreadsheets in LANs/Intra/Extranets
• support rapid prototyping of Linked Data apps (edit human-readable live data behind the exposed SPARQL endpoint)

Features:

Last week, the first Web of Data Practitioners Days (WOD-PD 2008) took place in the beautiful city of Vienna! It was a great time and fun to organize such an event with other (very reliable) guys in the Austrian Semantic Web community.

After Alan's talk at last week's WOD-PD in Vienna about Using the Web of Data we just discussed about Freebase and whether they would provide open standard RDF linked data in future... today Yves Raimond posted at to the SW mailinglist, they've launched http://rdf.freebase.com - ain't that funny?

Example, try:

Hi there,

after heavy testing this week, I can finally release a new and rather stable version of RDFStats v1.0 beta. This is the final release for the first step, so don't expect great changes in the near future. Of course, I will update the package upon bug fixes and use 1.0.x versions from now on.

The home of RDFStats is http://semwiq.faw.uni-linz.ac.at/rdfstats.

So what's new?

The last weeks have been rather busy, I've presented SemWIQ at ESWC and before ESWC I had spontanously decided to go to the Semantic Tech Conference in San José to see what's going on in the US.

Well, Jena-bundled Schemagen can be used to generate Java class representations for RDF ontologies (classes and properties will be represented by static constants). But this only helps at the schema level. When dealing with ontology instances in an RDF store one faces a similar problem than when working with relational databases: you would like to have a Java domain model representing your external data.

A nice Venn diagram can be found in Tim BL's spec of Notation3 at http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3 (Appendix).

Here is also a short overview: