December 22, 2004

Thank you and goodnight!

SWAD-Europe finally winds up this week as we send all our documents off to the Commission and settle down for a little rest.

Our reworked website will remain on the W3C site and now contains SVG and raster images of the postcard and tshirt design, which our designer Liz Turner has made available under a non-restrictive Creative Commons License for others to use. The site also contains our final report and complete text of all the deliverables. The wiki we used will stay put and this weblog will continue to be used by the SWBP working group.

We'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the project from the five partners W3C, ILRT, HP Labs, CCLC and Stilo or as contractors; and also everyone who joined in from the Semantic Web community, through the public and thesaurus mailing lists, the wiki and weblog, IRC discussions and workshops. You made the project successful and lots of fun to work on. We'd also like to thank Brian Macklin and Hans-Georg Stork at the European Commission for being patient and helpful.

A final word on tshirts: we've very much enjoyed playing semantic santa sending them all out but we know we missed people out who've done excellent work and we feel pretty bad about that. We have one or two left so if we offered you one and it didn't arrive, or you feel left out mail libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk and we'll see what we can do: but no promises, sorry.

All the best for the holidays,

Libby and Dan
Posted by lmiller2 at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2004

SKOS Core: Update to some term definitions and comments

A number of small changes have been made to the definitions and comments of some of the SKOS Core terms. These changes have been made mainly to refine the meaning and scope of these terms, and to bring them in line with the current development of the SKOS Core Guide.

The CVS change log reporting these changes is reproduced below.

----------------------------
revision 1.36
date: 2004/12/17 13:43:58; author: ajm65; state: Exp; lines: +11 -3
Change to skos:related - Changed the definition to mention 'associative relationships', because previous definition too broad, and also to bring in line with BS8723 definition of 'associative relationships'.
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revision 1.35
date: 2004/12/17 13:37:39; author: ajm65; state: Exp; lines: +8 -2
Change to skos:OrderedCollection - The text 'where both the grouping and the ordering are meaningful' added to the definition.
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revision 1.34
date: 2004/12/17 13:34:05; author: ajm65; state: Exp; lines: +9 -1
Change to skos:ConceptScheme - Reworked the definition, in line with new guide. Concept scheme now defined as 'a *description* of a set of concepts, which may include a description of relationships between those concepts'. This change made to make explicit the fact that semantic relationships between concepts may be part of a concept scheme. Also expresses modelling concept scheme as an information resource (hence the 'description' word added).
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revision 1.33
date: 2004/12/17 13:28:08; author: ajm65; state: Exp; lines: +8 -1
Change to skos:Concept - Removed the comment about inferring the meaning of a resource of type skos:Concept, because it was misleading (move to intentional model, where properties of a concept *explain* the meaning of the concept, but do not determine it. This allows for clearer modelling of concepts in multiple schemes).
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revision 1.32
date: 2004/12/17 13:23:26; author: ajm65; state: Exp; lines: +10 -1
Changes to skos:Collection - The word 'meaningful' added to the definition; small change to the comment to make it clearer.
----------------------------

Posted by ajmiles at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2004

New Property 'hiddenLabel' added to SKOS Core

A new property skos:hiddenLabel has been added to SKOS Core. The definition for this property indicates that a hidden label is 'a lexical label for a resource that should be hidden when generating visual displays of the resource, but should still be accessible to free text search operations.'

This property is currently a sub-property of rdfs:label.

Posted by ajmiles at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

Small change to skos:inScheme

The skos:inScheme property is no longer a sub-property of rdfs:isDefinedBy, because the latter in fact expresses more precise semantics. The latter should be used to express a relationship between a concept and its original, defining, concept scheme (if one exists). Use the skos:inScheme property expresses a relationship between a concept and any concept scheme in which it participates, which may or may not be the original, defining concept scheme.

(This change to better handle inclusion of concepts in multiple schemes).

Posted by ajmiles at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2004

ADTF:Gohse

URL: http://cohse.man.ac.uk/gohse/
Date created: 2004-12-10

Description:
The aim of COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) was to research into methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). It uses three leading-edge technologies: an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion and the integration of the ontology service and the open hypermedia link service to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents. GOHSE is a demonstration of the COHSE infrastructure to bioinformatics. COHSE brings together an ontology and an open hypermedia service to dynamically add links to web resources. In this example, the Gene Ontology is used as the ontology, with resources from the GO annotation database as link targets.

Author:
Sean Bechhofer University of Manchester

Posted by felixbur at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

ADTF:Annotea

URL: http://www.annotea.org/ISWC2004/annoteademo.html
Date created: 2004-12-10

Description:
Annotea is a W3C LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project under Semantic Web Advanced Development (SWAD). Annotea enhances collaboration via shared metadata based Web annotations, bookmarks, and their combinations. By annotations we mean comments, notes, explanations, or other types of external remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document without actually needing to touch the document. When the user gets the document he or she can also load the annotations attached to it from a selected annotation server or several servers and see what his peer group thinks. Similarly shared bookmarks can be attached to Web documents to help organize them under different topics, to easily find them later, to help find related material and to collaboratively filter bookmarked material.

Contact:
Marja-Riitta Koivunen Annotea

Posted by felixbur at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

ADTF:Momis

URL: http://dbgroup.unimo.it/Momis/
Date created: 2004-12-10

Description:
The MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is a framework to perform information extraction and integration from both structured and semi-structured data sources, plus query management facilities to take incoming queries and process them through the exploitation of the annotated Global Schema, GVV. The framework consists of a language and several semi-automatic tools.
The MOMIS system is based on a conventional wrapper/mediator architecture, and provides methods and open tools for data management in Internet-based information systems by using a CORBA-2 interface.

Contact:
Francesco Guerra DII- Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy

Posted by felixbur at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

ADTF:Bibster

URL: http://bibster.semanticweb.org/
Date created: 2004-12-10

Description:
Bibster is a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic data among researchers, obtained e.g. from Bibtex files. Bibster exploits ontologies in data representation, query formulation, query-routing and answer presentation. Bibster is a fully implemented open source solution built on top of the JXTA platform. The system is currently being used by several hundreds of users from multiple organizations across the world.

Contact:
Peter Haase AIFB, University of Karlsruhe

Posted by felixbur at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2004

ADTF:Flink

URL: http://prauw.cs.vu.nl:8080/flink/
Date created: 2004-12-09

Description:
Flink is a crossover between a social experiment and a semantic application. It brings together a number of different knowledge sources and use them to learn about the social structures of the community that created them - in this case, the community of Semantic Web researchers. The resulting application is a Who is Who of the Semantic Web, which can be of interest to this community as a reflection of their social organization, but is also valuable as an input for Social Network Analysis, a branch of sociology concerned with relational data. Export to popular network analysis packages is directly supported by the application.

Author:
Peter Mika Free University, Amsterdam

Posted by felixbur at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

ADTF:Swoogle

URL: http://swoogle.umbc.edu
Date created: 2004-12-07

Description:
Swoogle is a crawler-based indexing and retrieval system for the Semantic Web documents - i.e., RDF or OWL documents. It analyzes the documents it discovered to compute useful metadata properties and relationships between them. The documents are also indexed by using an information retrieval system which can use either character N-Gram or URIs as terms to finnd documents matching a user's query or to compute the similarity among a set of documents. One of the interesting properties computed for each Semantic Web document is its rank - a measure of the document's importance on the Semantic Web.

Author:
Li Ding University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Posted by felixbur at 02:11 PM | Comments (1)

December 07, 2004

ADTF:SematicWebAssistant

URL: http://www.roetzel.de/swa/
Date created: 2004-12-07

Description:
The Semantic Web Assistant explores the possibilities of a combination of Semantic Web technologies with production rule systems for letting end-users discover some of the powerful applications of the SemanticWeb on their desktop and was developed as a prototype on top of the Jena Semantic Web Framework. The Semantic Web Assistant combines the data on the Semantic Web with the capabilities of forward chaining production rule systems. It lets the user define simple if-then rules that operate on RDF data obtained from the Web. RDF Schema and OWL Ontologies can be used to deduce additional data. Conclusions of rules include actions that are carried out when a rule instance fires. The Semantic Web Assistant includes some predefined actions, eg. e-mail notification, downloading of web resources and execution of arbitrary system commands. Adding additional actions should be easy. Possible applications of the Semantic Web Assistant include the monitoring of news sites or weblogs using the RSS 1.0 RDF vocabulary. Given the generic nature of the rule mechanisms applications are only limited by the availability of RDF data and the user's imagination.

Author:
David Roetzel University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany

Posted by felixbur at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)

ADTF:UNSO

URL: http://cslx.haifa.ac.il/~slavax/UNSO.html
Date created: 2004-12-07

Description:
Unspecified Ontologies for P2P: this approach premises that the domain ontology of an E-commerce application is not fully defined and parts of it can be dynamically specified by the peers. To implement semantic routing we extend a hypercube graph structure to a multi-layered hypercube (MLH), where each vertex recursively consists of another hypercube. We use hashing to deal with the unspecified nature of the ontology and with the variety of terms that can be used. This allows the peers to distributively manage a dynamically growing ontology and uniformly distributes the ads among the MLH. To eliminate ambiguity and enhance system precision, the terms used by the peers in the ontological description of an object undergo simple semantic standardization using WordNet.

Author:
Shlomo Berkovsky University of Haifa, Israel

Posted by felixbur at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

ADTF: Sem.Portal.Intern.Affairs

Description (original URL access protected): http://whitepapers.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025945,60120539p-39000589q,00.htm
Date created: 2004-12-07

Description:
Semantic Portal on International Affairs: A web-portal architecture for a political institute, where the online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language interface, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component.

Contact:
Jesus Contreras Intelligent Software Components S.A. (iSOCO)

Posted by felixbur at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)