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Attending No Fluff Just Stuff

November 5th, 2010

I’m attending the 2010 No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Reston, VA this weekend. One of the speakers is Brian Sletten, a self-proclaimed “Semantic Web Nerd,”  who presented a really excellent RDFa session – and I’m not just saying that because he plugged our book on his “Recommended Reading” slide. To understand why his talk really struck a chord with me, I’ll provide some background.

For better or worse, I’ve been a bit of out of the Semantic Web world lately. I’m currently not working on any projects for which the Semantic Web is considered a critical technology. I’ve watched as many of the Semantic Web programs I had involvement in were scaled back or disappeared entirely as government funding dried up. It was hard to not feel like the Semantic Web was dying a slow death. What’s worse is that upon reflection, I found it hard to identify a program where the Semantic Web was truly a critical feature and not just an alternate implementation decision that could have just as easily been replaced with any number of traditional technology solutions. Maybe I was just jaded after working in the same technology area for 6 years, or maybe I was going through my own trough of disillusionment.

The keynote address at NFJS (by Venkat Subramaniam) spoke to the value of exposing yourself to many different programming languages, even if you only have one or two primary languages. The process of learning a new language trains you to think about programming in new ways. It introduces you to the various challenges that all languages face as well as the strategies that a particular language employs to address these issues. This is much the same with any technology. Learning about alternate ways to solve problems helps us become better problem solvers. And isn’t that the real goal? Along this line of thinking, best practices are the enemy of innovation and creativity because they create a safe little box in which we can live without having to go out into the unknown to explore. This got me to thinking about my career in the Semantic Web world. I’d been so focused on using the Semantic Web that I’ve neglected to learn about alternate technologies and the lessons they have to offer. I’ve stifled my problem solving skills by keeping too narrow a focus and failing to recognize the opportunities for hybrid solutions that leverage many technologies, not just Semantic Web.

Now, back to the point. Brian’s RDFa talk was excellent. It reintroduced me to all of the progress being made in achieving the Semantic Web. Big organizations are starting to adopt and leverage the Semantic Web via RDFa. IBM and Open Document Format. Drupal RDFa and CMS.  The White House? MediaWiki. Creative Commons Licenses. Newsweek. Facebook – and Microsoft, IMDB, RottenTomatoes, Yelp, NHL!? Best Buy. Google!! Really. There are too many to list. Many of these sites you can go to now and view their source to find the RDFa. It’s happening.

All of this progress made me realize something. Beyond all of the hype and inflated expectations. Beyond the lost hope and naysayers. The industry is starting to adopt the Semantic Web for real. They are starting to see the real business case for open linked data. People are starting to find specific applications where the Semantic Web makes sense and might actually help. And, all of this leaves me with a renewed desire to find opportunities to apply technologies that complement and are complemented by Semantic Web technologies.

Events, No Fluff Just Stuff

FriendTracker v1.1.0 Released!

October 16th, 2009

We’ve released an update to the FriendTracker application that accompanies the book. The updated code can be found on the downloads section of the web site, or the following links [zip|7z|tar.gz]. This is the code that we (John Hebeler and Ryan Blace) demonstrated at the DC Semantic Web meetup in August (sorry to those who were waiting for me to post the code… my daughter was born the day after the meetup!)

Updates:
- Sorted names in the names list
- Improved status reporting
- Lots of bug fixes
- Ported to Pellet 2.0 for large performance improvement
- Improved error reporting

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Twitter Integration!

June 26th, 2009

We’ve integrated our Twitter feed into the blog using a cool WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. Now you can track our Twitter feed directly from this page and a tweet will be generated whenever we add a new post. Check it out on the sidebar, or follow us directly on Twitter @semwebprog.

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OWL 2 in Action – Property Chains

June 15th, 2009

pc_tutorial_ontology

This is the second article in our series that expands the code example from Chapter 5 of Semantic Web Programming to cover the semantics of OWL 2. This article covers property chains. The code can be downloaded from here (zip, 7z, tar.gz) and includes an Eclipse project with all required dependencies.

This article focuses on the semantics of property chains and how they are interpreted and applied in a reasoner that supports most of OWL 2 semantics (Pellet 2.0 RC6 – see the Pellet documentation for a full list of the semantics supported in each release candidate).

As I said in the first article, for a more in-depth exploration of OWL and Semantic Web, feel free to reference the book as needed or buy a copy so you can learn about the cool stuff in this article and more. Click the link below to read the rest of the article…

Read more…

Book, OWL 2 In Action, Tutorial , , , , ,

OWL 2 in Action – Qualified Cardinality Restrictions

June 1st, 2009

Cmap of a qualified cardinality restriction

This article is the first in a short series of articles that expands the code example from Chapter 5 of Semantic Web Programming to include some of the features of OWL 2. The code can be downloaded from here (zip, 7z, tar.gz), including an Eclipse project and all dependencies. This article focuses on how the semantics of qualified cardinality restrictions are interpreted and applied in a reasoner that supports most of OWL 2 semantics (Pellet 2.0 RC6 – see the Pellet documentation for a full list of the semantics supported in each release candidate).

For a more in-depth exploration of OWL and Semantic Web, feel free to reference the book as needed or buy a copy so you can learn about the cool stuff in this article and more :)

Recall from Chapter 4 in the book that cardinality restrictions are a way to specify the number of statements that describe an individual with a unique value that have a particular property as the predicate of each statement… Read more…

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