Resources
The Emerging Semantic Web Publishing
Semantic web publishing refers to publishing information as data objects using a semantic web language or as documents with explicit semantic markups. Semantic publication is intended for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
Nigel Shadbolt, Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall, The Semantic Web Revisited, IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(3) pp. 96-101, May/June 2006.
Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, Scientific publishing on the ‘semantic web’, Nature 410, 1023 - 1024 (
Henry S. Rzepa and Peter Murray-Rust, A new publishing paradigm: STM articles as part of the semantic web.
The Foundations: Semantic Web and Standards
Resource Description Framework (RDF): a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
Web Ontology Language (OWL): OWL facilitates greater machine interoperability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/
RDFa Primer 1.0: RDFa is a syntax that accomplishes this metadata expression using a set of elements and attributes that embed RDF in XHTML. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
Exciting Application Areas and Tools
- Creating data feeds and data resources on the web
Ufeed online tool: A free web site for individuals and organizations to create and provide datafeeds and RDF data resources on the web. Ufeed provides the base for unified data feed using semantic web standards. Data are entered once by user and should be reusable across the web. Since it’s free online service, there is no need for user to install any software. User will be able to provide data feeds from their own web sites by simply inserting the URI links into their web pages. http://web2express.org/ufeed/
- Building semantic web site or adding semantic web dimension to existing web site
Exhibit: Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code. http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/
Haystack: The Haystack Project is investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them. http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/
D2R Server: D2R Server is a tool for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web. It enables RDF and HTML browsers to navigate the content of the database, and allows applications to query the database using the SPARQL query language. http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/d2r-server/
Protégé: The Protégé platform supports two main ways of modeling ontologies via the Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL editors. Protégé ontologies can be exported into a variety of formats including RDF(S), OWL, and XML Schema. http://protege.stanford.edu/
Public Knowledge Project: The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University on the west coast of Canada. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and conferences. Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems increase access to knowledge, improve management, and reduce publishing costs.
Structured Blogging: Structured Blogging is all about giving bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information, such as reviews and events.
- Publishing research data in semantic format
Semantic publishing is not only changing the face of web publishing but also scientific publishing. Tim Berners-Lee predicted in 2001 that the semantic web “will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine”. Revisiting the semantic web in 2006, he and his colleagues believed the semantic web “could bring about a revolution in how, for example, scientific content is managed throughout its life cycle”. One simple idea that may radically change scientific communication is for researchers to directly self-publish their experiment data in semantic format on the web. In one scenario, a scientist could design and run an experiment, and share the experiment information with the world in real time by publishing the data as a semantic object on the web. Semantic search engines will make these semantic data available at everyone’s finger tips. W3C interest group in healthcare and life sciences is exploring this idea of self-publishing of experiment.
Web2x semantic publishing plugin for Wordpress: A new platform for semantic web publishing of web pages, product information, and experiment data. http://web2express.org/openlab/web2x-publishing-software/
Science Commons: Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle.
Connexions: Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.
- Creating global entity identification
FOAF: FOAF documents are, in essence, machine-readable home pages. http://rdfweb.org/
- Building centralized data repository or publishing service
DSpace: The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material. Research institutions worldwide use DSpace as an institutional repository, a learning object repository, for records management, and more. The DSpace open source platform is freely available so you can customize and extend it to suit your needs.
Open Archives Initiative: The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements.
- Creating Social Community
DBin: DBin is general purpose Semantic Web application that enables power users (domain experts) to create “discussion groups” where users annotate any subject of interest. http://www.dbin.org/
- Creating semantic search engine
Swoogle: Swoogle is a search engine for the Semantic Web on the Web. Swoogle crawl the World Wide Web for a special class of web documents called Semantic Web documents, which are written in RDF.