Constant progress is being made to disambiguate the information mine on the Web by using semantic web metadata to mark up web content, using RDF, OWL, and HTTP, but with additional features which add more descriptive metadata to resources. The POWDER (Protocol for Web Description Resources) W3C Working Group is behind the initiative, and major Web players are starting to notice. A number of developments were published on the 15^th of August 2008, including Formal Semantics, Grouping of Resources, Description Resources, Primer, and Test Suite.  The work of POWDER contributes to one overarching objective: improving both the developer’s and the user’s experience of the Web, from a number of perspectives. These can be stated in terms of three related concepts: making the Web more personal, relevant and trustworthy. Given the fundamental role of these characteristics in search (engines), this should be precisely the reason why global search companies are displaying interest. For example, Powder’s most recent Outreach day, on the 22 September, was sponsored by Yahoo! 

Powder enhances Web content by increasing its relevance, as each piece of content is marked up, specifying what it is in terms of RDF. So, this is already known by most Semantic Web developers. What sets POWDER apart is the inclusion of a number of other features, such as classifying single items within content groups, Data Retrieval Efficiency, allowing the user to decide whether a resource (such as a PDF) is relevant for their requirements before they download it, based on the description, profile matching, trustmarks, and semantic annotation. Profile matching enables the user to judge whether the resource which will be retrieved is actually what they are looking for, in terms of their preferences, for example, is it mobile compatible?, does it have child protection? Trustmarks allow partners in the web to verify the claims made by the descriptions and act as certification authorities, and the final feature is easy semantic annotation, effectively, putting the pow(d)er in the user’s hands.

 http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/

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On the 28^th of April, Ben Werdmuller introduced the Open Data Definition in a guest post on Steve O’Hear’s blog. The Open Data Definition http://opendd.net/ is one of the most recent efforts to build Data Portability between Social Networks and user data, for import and export of data between social sites. He discusses the current (what he refers to as) “half-solutions” available for transferring data, such as services giving the user access to his data through third party tools, and other existing solutions, such as SOAP, RDF and FOAF. However, it is lamentable that he focuses on dismissing the usefulness of such languages by pointing out their shortcomings, for example, saying that RDF is “…prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation”. However, this may be part of a marketing strategy for his application, the ODD built into Elgg, the open source social application engine. Any reference to Google Open Social API is also noticeably missing from the post. 

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The most recent version of a Universal Server Platform for enterprise information integration and management, which uses Semantic Web technology, was released by OpenLink Software, Inc. on the 31^st of January. The product is an extensive solution for a number of aspects of an organization, such as Data Management and Integration (SQL, XML, and RDF), Application Integration (Web Services and SOA), Business Process Management using BPEL, and Distributed Collaborative Applications. The architecture contains a Virtual Database Engine comprised of an XML Database, an RDF Triple Store, an SQL Database, Web Services, and a Free Text Engine. The Virtual Database Engine is built on top of a Unified Storage Engine that enables storage of XML, SQL, RDF, and Free Text data. The main contribution of the application is that data about many entities which are part of a company’s operations, such as customers, suppliers, invoices, and orders can be represented in RDF form, and is thus transferable to Semantic Web applications. A Meta Schema language is used to view SQL, XML, and Web Service data as RDF linked data. SPARQL is also fully supported.

http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/

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Reuters launched a new Web service last week which provides free semantic tagging capabilities, instigating the improved integration of Web content, as well as compatibility of the metadata with other semantic applications such as Blue Organizer, Hakia, Wikia, Freebase, Powerset and Twine.

http://www.opencalais.com/

The Web service is an API whose capabilities serve for a dual perspective: both for the providers of content and the consumers of content. That is, the metatagging service is available for both public and private bodies who generate information (content), for example, company web sites, and blogs, as well as for those who retrieve content, such as search engines, RSS readers, and news portals. The generation of semantic metadata is automatic and incorporates any existing metadata into the output, which is returned to the user in RDF format. An additional functionality which adds user friendliness to the service is a Windows application which enables the user to view the output, the types of metadata extracted, by browsing a folder which contains the texts processed.

MetaWeb

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W3C has made a working draft of 3 specifications for OWL 1.1 publicly available. The specifications are detailed as a set of 3 documents: Structural Specifications and Functional-Style Syntax, Model-Theoretic Semantics, and Mapping to RDF Graphs. The features listed in the specifications were developed based on user requirements. The principal new additions presented by W3C include enhanced syntactic capabilities, improved compatibility with other datatypes, simple metamodeling, extended annotations, and extra property and qualified cardinality constructors. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl11-semantics-20080108/

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This week saw the launch of the GroupMe! Semantic Web application. GroupMe! is based on the concepts of social bookmarking systems such as Flickr and del.icio.us, and other interactive sites like Wikis. The novelty of the site lies in the fact that it provides steps towards creating ontologies from folksonomies based on groups, the resources in each group, and the tags assigned to each resource.

The application allows the user to create his/her own group corresponding to the user’s interests, and enables the addition of content using a resource search. The options for adding resources include results generated from Google, Flickr, GroupMe! groups, and GroupMe! resources. The user also has the possibility to manually add a resource by URL and an RSS feed by URL.

GroupMe! lets the user create a group and add content based on his/her own mental image of how information should be organized. However, the content is later labeled with RDF. The user can add tags to the multimedia resources in his group, which comprise the content of the group. As more users add more groups and tagged content, relations between tags are extracted. Over time, search and ranking strategies are improved. Thus, the starting point is the user’s idiosyncratic pattern of assigning an arbitrary tag to a resource in a group. The output is RDF produced from the association between the tags for resources and groups. The site also allows the user to view other users groups and resources. A set of APIs is available to allow further reuse of the tools.

http://groupme.org/

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Microformats are a number of defined specifications for tagging online data with html within particular information fields, with drafts for additional specifications under development. GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) can be applied to extract RDF data from web pages, microformat tags, and XML documents, typically by XSLT. Today in the XML2007 conference in Boston, Mary Ann Malloy of the MITRE Corporation proposed the application of microformats to data in the Department of Defense. Useful information could then be distributed to a wider audience through the use of mashups. Malloy presented the potential of microformats for information relevant for the Department of Defense, such as mission, vehicles, tracks, overlays, and targets. The microformats could then be used as input to map mashups, timeline mashups, and planner mashups. MITRE is a non-profit organisation comprised of 6,700 scientists, engineers and support specialists which manages three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs): aviation system development, defense and intelligence, and enterprise modernisation.

http://2007.xmlconference.org/public/schedule/detail/273

http://www.mitre.org/

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