Significant news for the spread of Semantic Web standards was published on the 1^st of May, when Digg officially announced that it would become a “beta tester” for RDFa by applying it to its content. Digg is a social news aggregator which decided to put RDF into real-world use by implementing it as metadata for XML on its site. RDF triples can subsequently be extracted from the markups. The news was announced on Digg’s blog in a rather modest statement by Steve Williams, one of the principal moderators: “We’ve added RDFa, making Digg part of the “semantic web” where Web pages become more sophisticated, beyond simply words and pictures.” The move may appear discrete at first sight, but it is in fact a sign of a large shift in the growing adoption of Semantic Web standards and Data Portability on the Web. Digg announced its membership of the Data Portability group last January.

 http://digg.com/

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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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Last week a semantic email search application was made available by IBM for free download, IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/emailsearch/download
The application addresses one of the challenges faced by email users unaware of the Semantic Web: it performs metadata tagging automatically without the user requiring knowledge of semantic annotation.

The core technology underlying OmniFind, UIMA (Unstructured Information Management), is not new; it uses pattern recognition to extract instances of concepts such as phone numbers and addresses, and labels them with semantic XML tags, creating relationships between them. Users then enter keywords to represent their search queries. The advantage of the application is that it is usable by both ordinary email users and developers. It enables experienced users to customise their search facility by editing the default tags, or creating their own, using regular expressions to extract concepts. It is suggested by IBM that this tool could be extremely useful in a corporate setting, as tags can be customised to an organisation’s specific information requirements.

The components include an e-mail crawler available as a plugin for Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook, a document-processing, concept-tagging pipeline, an indexing component, a run-time semantic search component, and a tagger utility. The image below provides a link to an example of the output of the tool.

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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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