Why product feed?
September 3, 2007
August 28, 2007
New free data feed service now available: Ufeed
[::Subject::]
Data feed, RDF data resource, product feed, news feed
[::Category::]
News
[::Content::]
I’m glad to announce a new tool – unified data feed (Ufeed) now available on web2express.org. This tool allows individuals and organizations to create data feeds for products, news, events, jobs and studies on the web. At the same time, the data you enter also exist as semantic data resources that you and your audience can reuse across the web. When you visit web2express.org, this free data feed service is presented to you by default. You can simply sign up, which gives you a private workspace to create and manage your data feeds.  To provide the data feeds on your web site, simply insert the feeds’ URIs into your web pages.  All of the data feed and RDF data resources on this web site are open to the public.
Developing a practical tool/service for people to open their data on the semantic web is one of the main goals web2express.org has been pursuing as an open lab. The first semantic publishing tool released last year is a plugin for Wordpress blogger. Many people have checked out the demo for the web2x semantic blogging. However, it requires installing the software on user’s web server, which is a big hurdle for many people.  I feel the best tool for many users would be a free online service – no need to install and maintain any software. Thus, the unified data feed online service is born.
The Ufeed service is designed to ease the pain of many individuals and small organizations that have not yet been able to provide data feeds. Web feed is becoming an increasingly important marketing channel. I hope you will find Ufeed a useful service – enabling you to regain the competitive edge in the current evolution of data web.
Enjoy feeding your data!
-AJ
[::Author::]
AJ Chen
[::Contact Person::]
AJ Chen
[::Alternative Web Page::]
December 5, 2006
Why publishes raw experiment data?
[::Content::]
Current research publishing/communication model: After doing a series of experiments, researchers usually write up a paper to present the findings, interesting results backed by data. Research papers serve as the main communication vehicle within as well as outside the research community. In addition, researchers present their findings in various conferences. Papers and conference talks are typically published in journals, proceedings, and books in print form and/or in electronic form.
The current scientific publishing model has worked pretty well for centuries. However, it also has obvious problems. This first main problem is lack of free access, i.e. access to the published materials is mostly limited to paid-users. This problem is being addressed by the Open Access movement.
The second main problem with current publishing model is that publishing research paper is not an efficient way to share data. There are several reasons for this:
- Because a research paper usually is a complex synthesis of many experimental facts and interpretations of the facts, it is not an easy task for human, never mind computer, to sort out the individual facts.
- Most of experiment data are not included in publication and thus remain inaccessible to the research community. For the experiment data used in research paper, typically little detail is given.
- Long delay of data availability. Usually, the data already becomes several months to a couple of years old when the research paper comes out.
These inefficiencies really hamper data sharing and information discovery. So, new ways of publishing are needed in order to increase the efficiency of sharing research information. I think direct publishing of experiment data on the web presents a good solution. Imaging for a moment that information about every experiment is available at your finger tips, organized by single experiment unit, would that make your search of prior studies in terms of experiments, data, and results much faster and precise? What if every researcher makes their experiment data available in real time or immediately after the experiments are completed? Would that make your research also go faster? The answers are certainly yes, I believe. This is why publishing experiment data makes absolute sense.
You may as why it was not done before? There could be many reasons that require clear understanding. One main reason could be pure economics. Before Internet age, publishing means printing and traditional distribution, which is very costly business. The volume of the experiment data is so huge that no publisher would consider publishing every piece of experiment data a sound business.
Well, what’s different today? Today is a very different environment from 15 years ago. For one thing, Internet technologies and web economy has made the cost of web publishing and distribution almost disappear. Therefore, publishing all experiment data on the web becomes a viable idea now. The benefits of being able to search through every experiment data on the planet efficiently and the potential to accelerate scientific discovery is so high that, I think, this idea is going to become reality in the near future. In fact, data sharing in life sciences has been a very active research subject in recent years. Some good examples include MGET, GO, FUGO, BIOPAX, etc. These projects are developing ontologies for representing data in their specific scientific domains.
Experiment data can be represented at different levels of granularity. Web2express.org is approaching the data sharing problem from the opposite end of the spectrum comparing to the bioscience projects like MGET. It’s developing shallow ontology to represent data across all scientific fields, such as life sciences, computer, social science, etc. Early version (v0.2) of SPE ontology for self-publishing of experiments is being reviewed within W3C HCLS interest group, and demo publishing tool is available online for testing and download.
[::Subject::]
Open data, semantic publishing, ontology, SPE, semantic web
[::Category::]
Internet software
[::Author::]
AJ Chen
November 14, 2006
Web2x Publishing Software v0.2
[::Subject::]
open data, web publishing, semantic publishing, semantic web, BOON, SPE
[::Product Category::]
Internet Software
[::Catalog Number::]
web2×0001
[::Model::]
open source
[::Version::]
0.2
[::Short Description::]
Web2x Publishing software is an easy-to-use self-publishing platform for publishing information to the current HTML web layer as well as the emerging semantic web layer. It is built on top of the popular open source blogger software called WordPress. Using Web2x Publishing, users can publish specific types of information such as product and experiment in HTML and in RDF at the same time. Information published this way will be searchable by both regular and semantic search engines, and thus will become more widely accessible. Web2x implements ontologies for semantic publishing that are being developed by open communities such as W3C.
[::Specifications::]
Current Features
1. Add a semantic dimension to existing company web site. One can publish all the usual web pages in semantic data format, including products, services, licensing opportunity, technology, news, events, and company information.
2. Semantically publish any experiment and related information by writing specific types of posts and pages, including Experiment, Project, Protocol, Publication.
3. Automatically pre-fill the editor with template corresponding to the semantic post or page.
4. Automatically save semantic post and page to RDF file. As a result, each specific post or page is presented in two forms: HTML and RDF.
5. Provide RDF link on each HTML page for the published semantic data.
6. Create a site map, which is dynamically generated each time when the page is viewed and thus always up-to-date.
7. Create product catalog page listing all products.
Web2x is built on top of WordPress, which has many useful features, including:
1. Organize published information in categories, and archive information by month and day.
2. Allow readers to provide comments to the published information, an effective way to interact with everyone in the community.
3. User account and privilege control.
4. Hundreds of themes to choose from.
5. Optimized for search engines.
6. RSS feed available.
[::Key Technology::]
Implements BOON ontology and SPE ontology. Represents web information in both HTML and RDF.
[::Applications::]
Intended Users:
Researchers: Any researcher or laboratory doing research and development can use this self-publishing tool to publish individual experiments, projects, protocols, and researcher information as web pages and semantic data objects (RDF file).
Product providers: Any product providers, either manufacturers or distributors, can use this self-publishing tool to publish their web site information, particularly product catalog, as web pages and semantic objects.
User Benefits:
For researchers:
• Unlock your most precious assets – experiment data. Traditionally, you publish your research results and selected data as papers in research journals. This process leaves out most of your experiment data. Even for the data published in papers, they most likely are not available for search through popular free search engines because papers’ full-texts are kept behind wall by publishers. Such traditional publishing model provides public exposure to only a tiny portion of your research information. Now, web2x self-publishing platform empowers you to share your research information with the world quick and easy, fully unlocking the values of your most precious assets.
• Maximize your visibility. The experiment information published by this tool becomes immediately available on the web in both HTML and RDF forms. This means your work will be accessible to not only regular search engines like Google and Yahoo but also semantic web search engines, which will increase your visibility.
• Better data sharing and searching. Experiment information published in RDF enables much more effective search based on semantics. Web2x implements ontologies developed by open communities like W3C and thus ensure your data can be shared and discovered by the largest number of people as well as applications.
• Open new doors for collaboration. Since your published data will be in semantic format, they can be accurately cross-referenced and integrated. Other people may discover one or more of your experiments can be re-used in their studies, which will bring to you unexpected opportunities for collaboration.
• Publish and share your data at your own pace. Web2x is built on popular blogger software WordPress, which is designed to be installed on your web server in a few simple steps. With the publishing tool under your control, you can publish whenever you want and own whatever you publish.
For product providers:
• Optimize search engine marketing by leveraging the semantic web. Web2x publishes your product information on the web in both html and RDF formats. Not only regular search engines but also semantic web search engines will be able to find your products.
• Maximally expose your products. By publishing all your products with Web2x, your products are no longer locked in the database.
• Bring your products much closer to your customers. Your products published by Web2x will be given unique identifiers called URI. With these URIs available, your customers will be able to precisely identify the reagents and tools used in their experiments when they publish the experiments using Web2x.
[::User Manual::]
[::User Manual Link::]
http://web2express.org/openlab/docs/web2x-publishing.html
[::Image Link::]
[::References::]
[::Manufacturer::]
web2express.org
[::Distributor::]
[::Price (amount)::]
free
[::Price (currency)::]
[::Promotion::]
[::Launch Date::]
10 /19/2006
[::Alternative Web Page::]
October 19, 2006
Web2x Semantic Publishing Tool v0.2 available
[::Content::]
A new set of semantic objects are added to the Web2x Semantic Publishing tool for organizations to create a semantic dimension to their web site and online catalogs. Now, any organization can easily use this tool to publish product information and business related information as web page and RDF file at the same time. This new version (v0.2) supports the information types that normally are the core of any organization web site, including product, service, licensing, technology, job, news and events.
The emerging semantic web search engines offer more precise search of information that are represented in semantic format. To businesses, this newly available semantic layer within the current web can become new sources of traffics to their web sites. And it only requires a small effort to wrap a company’s existing web site in semantic format. A very large site may take a little bit more time, but the process should be easy to manage using the web2x semantic publishing tool.
Demo is available. Try it to see how easy to create a semantic web page for product and product catalog.
For administration features, you would need to download and install the software on your own server.
The software is developed as open source software and free to everyone. Developers are welcome to participate in the open source development.
Enjoy the ride of the rising semantic web wave.
[::Subject::]
semantic publishing, web site, semantic web
[::Category::]
Software, Internet
[::Author::]
AJ Chen
[::Contact Person::]
AJ Chen (ajchen AT web2express.org)