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
URL: http://www.semblog.org/wiki/?en
Date created: 2003
Description:
A personal publishing system with semantic web techniques. Publishing activity consists of not only content producing but also information gathering. In the current web environment, we perform these activities respectively for lack of glue. We adopt content aggregation and syndication methods with RSS: RDF Site Summary, which is a basic element of semantic web, to this problem. One of the key issues of semantic web is how metadata can be generated. We use Weblog tools for personal RSS generator. The user only describes her/his content in a fixed form so that the tool will create RSS-based metadata automatically.
Contact:
Ikki Ohmukai
National Institute of Informatics
More information:
Project Summary
Technical Overview
As we blogged last month, we have been putting together a portal inferface tool that allows us to take a collection of RDF, in our case descriptions of environmental organizations, and render it in a faceted browser. This is working well and enabled us to demonstrate a prototype successfully to Anthony Perret of the environment council at a recent meeting.
The dimensions to use to drive the browsing are described in the form of either RDFS class hiearchies or SKOS thesauri. It proved to be quite easy to use Jena's rule processing engine to add rules to propagate the transitive closure of the SKOS term lattice along with basic RDFS processing and a little OWL support (we needed inverse properties). In the portal description (in RDF of course) you can just specify a set of data sources and ontologies, together with what rule file you want to use for processing. Surprisingly simple rules have been enough to implement the functionality needed for the demo so far.
We've also been able to connect the two tools together. For an internal demonstration we were able to capture and classify some information snippets in a semblog and view them in the appropriate categories in a portal along with some preclassified documents. What makes it really fun is that the classification scheme itself, since it's expressed in RDF, is just another object you can browse and manipulate. So you can link in another data source, which uses a different classification scheme, and can see that scheme as another dimension available for use in browsing.
Categories WeblogsThe semantic blogging project is officially finished. Code, javadocs, and lessons learnt report are all available. However, some promising semblogging activity continues.
Firstly, the code is being downloaded and played with. Whether this will lead to other, "perhaps even unexpected" uses as I mentioned in the lessons learnt report remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.
Secondly, the bibliographic metadata theme seems to have struck a chord with people like Bruce D'Arcus, who are interested and active in the complex world of bibliographic metadata standards
Thirdly, the ideas are being picked up by the research community, UK Universities and even a startup (about which, perhaps, more anon). I also have a couple of evaluation projects ongoing within HP to move semblogging from an interesting prototype to a usable tool.
For readers wanting to know more, the best bet is the short vision statement I presented at BlogTalk 2003. Other resources (including code) are available on the download page.
The project maintains its own blog, on which snippets and micro-news continue to be posted. However, regular updates will also be posted on this, the main SWAD-E blog.