Hooray, the spanking new Semantic Web Dog Food site is finally ready for prime time at http://data.semanticweb.org! The site has been the central repository for conference metadata (people, papers, talks, organisations, etc.) from the major Semantic Web conferences (mainly ISWC and ESWC) in the past years, but so far has lacked a unified, cross-conference interface. Also, because different people had been responsible for generating the data for different conferences, the dataset wasn’t really as well interlinked as it could have been.

Now, with the help of funding from SWSA and the Nepomuk project, Richard Cyganiak, research intern Venkatram Yadav and me have managed to do a lot of data-cleaning and aligning and redo the whole site as a module on top of the Drupal CMS, with the result that everything is now a lot nicer looking, more user friendly, better interlinked and generally speaking cooler. Thanks a lot also to Stéphane Corlosquet, our local Drupal guru here at DERI, who helped us out with a lot of tricky Drupal questions.

Apropos Drupal: There is an interesting discussion going on at the moment in the Drupal community to add RDF export functionality to the Drupal Core system. What it means is basically exporting the Drupal DB as RDF (SIOC, FOAF, etc.). Somehow, our approach is the exact opposite – we export an RDF-DB through Drupal! Both approaches put together in a meaningful way would probably result in a very cool end product!

So, what can the Dog Food site do for you? Here is a list:

• Browse thousands of people, papers and organisations in your Web browser, …
• … or in a linked data browser – it’s all linked data!
• SPARQL to your heart’s content, making use of the named graphs we have established for each event in the database.
• To support your SPARQL needs, you can also use the snorql tool on the site.
• Comment and discuss each paper. All papers and comments are good citizens of the SIOC-osphere!
• Do a full-text search on the data on the site.
• Enjoy eye-candy like the map of all organisations in the repository (provided we have their geo-coordinates).

conference, deriblog, drupal, semanticweb | 2 Comments »

I just came back from the first VoCamp, held at Wolfson College in Oxford. It was the first in what will hopefully become a series of small, hands-on, community-driven events where people get together to build and work on vocabularies and ontologies for the Semantic Web. Peter Mika had a nice blog post recently on why such activity is badly needed.

The whole event was pretty organic and loosely organised. Compared to big, official events with lots of pretty boring talks (not saying that _all_ talks are always boring), VoCamp was refreshingly fun and engaging. I actually had the feeling that I was doing something useful. Ad-hoc groups formed on the spot, working on varied topics such as an IRC vocabulary, a whiskey ontology, something which could be called a “vocabulary starter pack for SemWeb newbies”, an evidence ontology, bio-med vocabularies, etc. The idea is that we will have a number of VoCamps in rapid succession (the next one will be in November here in Galway), and so, even though probably none of the individual topics will have enourmous impact just now, I think VoCamp can definitely create a lot of momentum over time.

On Thursday, we planned to take the opportunity to join the Oxford SWIG meeting, but unfortunately there didn’t seem to be a lot of Semantic Web interest just that evening in Oxford. However, I did manage to say hello to Kal Ahmed of TM4J (Topic Maps) fame!

conference, deriblog, semanticweb, travel, vocamp | 1 Comment »

Over at the spanking new SMILE group blog, there is a post about Dragos’s work on porting Shift to KDE, as part of the Nepomuk project. Of course, it’s not quite as slick as on a Mac. ;)

semanticweb, shift | No Comments »

Shift (as well as Kante and Knoten) have been available as source for a while now, but installing from source is not really a lot of fun if you just want to try it out.
So, now I finally got around to putting together an installer package for Shift, that will just install the binaries on your computer! It contains the Shift application itself, as well as three plugins (AddressBook, iCal and BibDesk). So, no more excuses – just download the installer, install Shift, and start creating RDFa! :)
When I get the time, I will put together a proper readme file. In the meantime, I hope you will find Shift self-explanatory.

Oh, and please send plenty of bug reports.

deriblog, rdfa, semanticweb, shift | No Comments »

Arggghhhhh… by some unfortunate series of events, I deleted this whole blog. I won’t tell you the long, boring story, just the bottom line: I will have to start over again. The only good thing about it is that it gives me the opportunity to implement some changes I had planned on doing for quite some time. For starters, I changed the name from “semiblog” to “kantenwerk”, because I’m no longer working on the semiBlog software. I realized it was a bit pointless to try building a complete blog authoring tool, when all I really wanted to do was provide a tool to annotate blogs with all kinds of content-related metadata. There are lots of really good blogging tools out there that have functionality that semiBlog just couldn’t compete with.

So, I extracted the core functionality of semiBlog – create RDF metadata from desktop objects – and threw away the rest. The result is an application called “Shift”, which simply let’s you take objects from other desktop applications (contacts, calendar event, papers, …) and generate a snippet of metadata from them in a very convenient way. Drag&Drop, autocompletion, copy&paste, that’s all. Those snippets can be in various format, such as RDFa, which makes it really easy to incorporate them into web pages – blog posts, but also any other web page. For WWW2007, I made a little video of Shift in action.

Also, instead of using this blog as the web site for one software project, I think I will just turn it into my personal web site. It’s too annoying to have to juggle around with too many different sites.

semanticweb, shift | No Comments »

Another one of those test posts, just to demonstrate how you can use Shift (formerly semiBlog) and SemClip to move data between desktops. The Shift application was written by Knud Möller, and allows you to produce RDFa code from desktop objects, which you can then use to annotate any webpage. E.g., this blog post! The Semantic Clipboard (or SemClip) is a software by Gerald Reif and his group, and allows you to do the exact opposite: you can copy RDFa (or other RDF) from web pages and paste it back into your desktop applications.
Both will be demonstrated at the Web Data 2 Session of the Developer’s Track at WWW2007 by Siegfried Handschuh.

semanticweb, shift | No Comments »