Last week we organised a second VoCamp – a grass roots, BarCamp-style workshop for creating Semantic Web vocabularies – in Galway. The setup was much like the first one in Oxford: we as the organisers provided the room and coffee breaks, but otherwise only set a very basic schedule (start-coffee-lunch-coffee-wrapup). The real action was provided by the delegates, who divided up into groups according to interests and worked away. On several occasions throughout the two days we all came together again and every group had the chance to report on their progress, discuss problems with all VoCamp delegates, etc. It was all very relaxed and productive, and with an interesting mix of people. Apart from a good crowd from DERI, there were people from Talis, Yahoo (Peter Mika was luckily able to make it) and Edinburgh. Some people even came from as far as Germany and Florida!

All the different groups and their results can be found on this wiki page, so I’ll just mention a few things here, such as vocabularies for meeting minutes, calls for papers or real estate (not forgetting the very important Ear Worm vocabulary), more work on a SW starter pack, discussions and work on Microformat-RDF mappings and RDFa in Drupal.

Luckily Galway was on its best behaviour – I think it didn’t rain at all during the two days. Looking forward to more VoCamps in other places soon!

conference, deriblog, drupal, rdfa, vocamp | No Comments »

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 »