Exploring the Semantic Web and its technologies.
An interesting video by David Siegel, the author of the book “Pull: the Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business”, about how information has evolved since the beginning of man.
The description of the video, originally posted on Vimeo, says: “David Siegel, author of 4 books about the web, presents his new 8-minute video on the history and future of information. Using a fast pace and fun graphics, Siegel introduces us to the next wave of innovation with two key concepts he claims will affect $10 trillion of commerce worldwide: Pull and the Semantic Web.”
New LOD Cloud Diagram
The LOD cloud diagram shows datasets that have been published in Linked Data format by contributors to the Linking Open Data community project, as well as other individuals and organisations. The latest version of the diagram shows 203 datasets, which comprise around 395 million links between over 25 billion RDF statements. The datasets hold semantic data about media, geographical info, publications, government info, life sciences, etc.
For more info on the LOD cloud diagram, click here.
For more info on the Linked Data initiative, click here.
An illustrated description of what the Semantic Web is all about.
Source: Focus.
The year Open Data went Worldwide
After sir Tim Berners-Lee called upon everyone to ‘put their data on the Web’ in his previous appearance on TED, he’s back on TED to show us what has been done with the (semantic) linked data on the Web, so far.
In this TED talk, we can see some interesting applications built upon the linked data provided by the UK and US Governments, which help users to access various information, spanning from the way their money is spent, to the safe bike routes through the city they live in. There are also some other interesting community-driven projects, such as the Open Street Map project, which seems to have helped the rescue teams during the Haitian post-earthquake rescue operations.
This is a truly motivational video, both for semantic / linked data publishers, and it’s consumers. Both data.gov.uk and data.gov contain lots of data, and it seems it is now up to the developers to find innovative and useful ways to exploit them.
Web 3.0: What can we expect from the WWW in the following years
The problem the World Wide Web is currently facing is the lack of mechanisms for easy and efficient consumption of relevant news, information and data from the huge amount of data present on the Web. The problem is worstening with the daily growth of these numbers. The way that Google provides us with relevant search results cannot keep pace with the growing number of pages and information on the Internet.
According to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the WWW, “when users search the Web, they are practically praying that they’ll get the required information.”
What is the Semantic Web?
The current Web is a vast network of documents. These documents, and thus the data they contained, are interconnected by mechanical means, using hyperlinks to reference each other. What’s been quite popular in the web research in the past nine years, is the idea of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the large number of it’s research and industrial partners: extending the principles of the current Web, from a Web of Documents, to a Web of Data. This endeavor is called the Semantic Web, and it aims to connect the data found on the web according to it’s meaning, i.e it’s semantics. This idea first appeared in the article “The Semantic Web”, published in May 2001 in Scientific American, by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lasila [1]. According to them, the Semantic Web is a Web in which the data has meaning, so it will create an environment in which software agents, which crawl the Web, will be able to perform sophisticated tasks assigned by users [1].
The Semantic Web is not a new, separate web, but an expansion of the existing Web, in which the data will have well-defined meaning, enabling computers and people to easily collaborate. The first steps towards the realization of this idea have already been taken. In the near future, with the constant development of Semantic Web technologies, our computers (and machines, in general) will be able to process and understand the data they only show today. This will produce new functionalities for the end users [1].
