The first SWAD-E workshop in a language other than english took place in Madrid on 13 June, in Spanish. As well as José Kahan and I from SWAD-E, two of the people who signed up for the workshop presented their work - José Ramón Perez Agüera and Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo.
The feedback suggests that it was a success, and it would be nice to see more developer workshops taking pace in different languages. It seems particularly important to me, since many people who live in a non-english-speaking country do a lot of work in english. This can help promote development in english, but it can also make experienced developers seem inaccessible to people who are their natural colleagues.
A formal report in english (also published in spanish) describes the detail of the presentations that were given. I thought a highlight was the review of SKOS against other thesaurus systems, and explanation of why it made a good choice, combined with the "happy customer" explanation of how to implement it with Jena.
But then, for me the highlight was actually getting the day to happen. Many thanks are due to many people - as well as those named, Eva, Inkel, Ismael, and Javier all deserve a special mention for their efforts to make sure that their work build bridges between communities who might otherwise be divided by the languages they happen to speak. More than simply teaching everyone Esperanto, there are clear and obvious benefits from this little bit of motivation already appearing.
Last week the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries hosted a regional awareness event in Lund, Sweden. The title of this event was 'Between Knowledge Organisation and the Semantic Web: Semantic Approaches in Digital Libraries' - see the event website for more information about the event and links to all the presentations.
I (Alistair Miles, CCLRC) felt privileged to be a part of such a high quality event, with rich discussions following on from excellent presentations. I presented the SWAD-E Thesaurus Activity's SKOS initiative, which is attempting to lay the foundations for a community driven development of standards in the area of the semantic web and knowledge organisation systems. Specifically I made an introduction to the SKOS-Core and SKOS-Mapping RDF schemas, and to the SKOS API for a terminology web service. The full presentation can be downloaded from here.
Congratulations to Traugott, Ann-Sofie and the Netlab team for hosting such a fine event.
URL: http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/RDFAuthor/
Date created: 2001-10
Description:
RDFAuthor is a graphical MAC OS X/java tool designed to ease the pain of creating RDF instance data. Authoring is largely a matter of dragging in data and binding it together using a graphical interface. RDF Schemas can be loaded into a browser and then dragged and dropped to create instances of classes and properties. URLs can also be dragged in from different applications. There is export to various formats including RDF/XML, image formats, SVG, PDF. RDF graphs can be loaded from files or the web and displayed. The MAC tool has more features than the Java tool.
Usecase:
RDFAuthor is useful for creating RDF files from scratch, for example for combining vocabularies from FOAF, Dublin Core to create an RDF document describing a person depicted in a photo.
Author:
More information:
RDFAuthor tutorial
URL: http://storymill.net/
Date created: 2004-05
2004-05
Description:
A Java application aimed at ordinary users who want to organise their digital photos. Includes outline of parts of iamge, drag and drop categorisation by date, place, people, event.
Contact:
Timothy Falconer
Immuexa
More information:
Tidepool and Storymill - learn more
URL: http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2001/08/codepict/
Date created: 2001-08
Description:
Multi-dimensional image search online demo - search by person, place, date, thing (using wordnet).
Author:
More information:
Photo metadata: the codepiction experiment
URL: http://creativecommons.org/
Date created: 2001
Description:
Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Creative Commons are designed for a variety of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. To this end, they have developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. These metadata enable applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. They provide an RDF Schema (http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/implement) with two major parts: a work description, and a license description. The work description uses Dublin Core properties to provide information about the work. Finally they provide online tools to generates the metadata describing your resources (http://creativecommons.org/license/)
Usecase:
"Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control - a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which 'all rights reserved' (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy - a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation - once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally - have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them - to declare 'some rights reserved.' "
Author:
More information:
Information for creators and developers
URL: http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/travel.html
Date created:
2002-06
Description:
"The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do
for me. When I got my proposed July 2001 travel itinerary in email, I
just couldn't bear the thought of manually copying and pasting each field
from the itinerary into my PDA calendar."
This is a collection of small comandline programs to convert legacy travel data to RDF and visualize the results.
Usecase:
Converting flight data from travel agents into RDF so that it can be combined with other data, visualized, and reasoned over.
Author:
More information:
Semantic Web Application Integration: Travel Tools
URL: http://www.foafnaut.org/
Date created: 2002-03
Description:
Browse the foaf universe with the foafnaut.
A browser for FOAF data, where graphs are expanded as required to find
more information about a person - who they know, and who they are
codepicted with. Written in SVG and javascript. It pulls in new
information from XML files as required, from a backend RDF database.
Author:
Author:
More information:
FOAFNaut documentation
URL: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/swc/annoterra.html
Date created: 2003
Description:
AnnoTerra is a Semantic Web Application that presents enhanced Earth
science newsfeeds by making focused semantic searches on NASA knowledge
catalogs using concepts and relationships of the Earth science realm.
At present, AnnoTerra processes newsfeeds from the NASA Earth Observatory
by extracting meaningful keywords. These keywords are then used to
perform ontology based semantic searches in the Global Change Master
Directory (GCMD) for relevant resources. The results retrieved are
subsequently mapped to an ontology of the Earth Observing System (EOS)
ClearingHOuse (ECHO) and a new search is performed for corresponding
datasets in the ECHO catalog. By creating an ontology for the GCMD and
ECHO, and a equivalence between the two, we've created a semantic
unification of Earth science resources registered in GCMD and data
collections registered in ECHO.
The project name, AnnoTerra, is derived from Annotated Terrestrial
Information, with the idea of enhancing existing data sources with extra
information.
Contact:
Daniel Ramagem
Science Systems and Applications, Inc.
More information:
AnnoTerra: Annotated Terrestrial Information
URL: http://seco.semanticweb.org/
Date created: 2003
Description:
The SECO system harvests RDF files from the Web and consolidates the different data sets into a coherent representation aligned along an internal schema. SECO provides interfaces for humans to browse and for software agents to query the data repository.
SECO is a system to enable collaboration in online communities. It collects RDF data from the web, stores it in an index, and makes it accessible via a web interface. As of late 2003 the system contained information about more than 7000 people and 2000 news items. This data has been created by a large number of people. The challenge is to tidy up this data and integrate it in a way that facilitates easy access and re-use.
Author:
More information:
An Integration Site for Semantic Web Metadata
URL: http://triplestore.aktors.org/SemanticWebChallenge
Date created: 2003
Description:
CS AKTiveSpace is a semantic web explorer for investigating the Computer
Science research domain in the United Kingdom. It combines information
from multiple heterogeneous sources, such as published RDF sources,
personal web pages, and data bases in order to provide an integrated view
of this multidimensional space.
Contact:
Nick Gibbins
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK
More information:
CS AKTiveSpace: Representing Computer Science in the Semantic Web