It’s All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web

This has been on my mind for a while – connecting the dots between all three of these concepts. I’m working on a more detailed post. I am glad to see that Richard MacManus from RWW just posted an article (It’s All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web) related to this and i think its very useful.

Open data:

data on the site is available to the public, but it doesn’t link to other data sources on the Web. It could be data that has been uploaded in CSV forma

How is it different from Linked data:

Open Data is simply ‘data on the web,’ whereas Linked Data is a ‘web of data.’

So presumably Linked Data is data that links to other data.

Good. So how is linked data different from semantic data? Or are they they the same? From the RWW post – this is pretty good:

Campbell quotes from a number of other articles, in trying to come to a conclusion about how Linked Data and the Semantic Web relate. Perhaps the best definition she found was this one by Paul Walk:

1. data can be open, while not being linked
2. data can be linked, while not being open
3. data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable
4. the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked“

So point #4 explains the main difference.  Bottom line data wants to be open and linked. When that happens it will enable the development of the Semantic Web.

Good stuff!

Social Networking, Semantic Searching and Science « Dennis’ Blog

I recently ran into this article on Denni’s blog. It’s a very well written article.

Perhaps its my naivete but I think the answer to some parts of the questions (reproduced below) lies in looking at articles that have cited a given article (to look forward) and look at references within the article (to look back). With this information you might be able to deduce the research path, who has built upon your findings (if the article is yours) and what those findings were. Once you know the ‘who’ information, you can then possibly look up their author information to find out if they are ‘stars’ in that area.

I don’t think that alone answers it but the answers should lie hidden within information we already have in our current online publications and some of the concepts he describes within this entry. An excellent read without doubt.

Questions from the blog entry

1. “I’m researching topic X. What are the seminal papers in this area? Who are the primary researchers whose work I shoud read?”

2. “Ten years ago I published a paper on topic Y, then got distracted by grant funding in another area. I’d like to understand the full ‘intellectual lineage’ of this paper, now that others have had a chance to chew on it. What has it lead to? Have questions been answered? Have new ones emerged?”

3. “Who are the currently active researchers working on topics most closely related to my own research? Are there any bright new stars whose work I should keep an eye on?”

Read this at  http://brainoids.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/social-networking-semantic-searching-and-science/

British Search Engine ‘Could Rival Google’

So hears another semantic search engine wolframalpha.com that’s apparently launching in May 2009.  Should remember to check it out.

So how does Wolfram|Alpha intend to surpass current search engines in terms of relevance? Or does the team believe it can offer something completely different and innovative?

Wolfram|Alpha is designed on the principle that current search engines rely too heavily on their vast databases of indexed pages; they simply make a best guess based on search criteria and serve up some hopefully relevant results.

By working with a search engine that understands natural language instead, Stephen Wolfram intends to closely understand people’s questions and answer them directly. He remarks that, “It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers—it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

Hakia for semantic search

Read this article on how semantic search engines are returning better results based on “meaning match”

I checked out the search engine they reference – Hakia. I tried out some basic searches and like how the results are all well organized so i can find what i want based on the context of my search. Of course this is just early experimentation but i assume researchers will find this very helpful

Ontologies come of age

I’ll get to the summary of what’s in here and my thoughts… but I want to keep it on here so i know to comment on it eventually

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-mit-press-(with-citation).htm

ReadWrite on The Road to semantic Web – Nov 2006

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_road.php

Primer on Notation3 (N3)

http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer

The source of all Semantic Web information

As soon as i read up on everything here and memorize – http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ – I will be a semantic web guru…

Easy!!!!

Ontologies/Schema for the Semantic Web – brief explanation

This is a very nice explanation from http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long

there’s no way for a computer or human to figure out what a specific term means, or how it should be used. The use of all these URIs is useless if we never describe what they mean. This is where schemas and ontologies come in. A schema and an ontology are ways to describe the meaning and realtionships of terms. This description (in RDF, of course) helps computer systems use terms more easily, and decide how to convert between them.

More sematic web reading stuff

So i found an article (third one listed below) and it pointed me to another as pre-read (the second one below) which in turn points me to a high level (first one below). So i’m going to read in this sequence and get sematic-fied.. (Free dictionary meaning of semantic)

1. High level
2. Semantic Web in breadth
3. Semantic Web – An Intro

And then there’s one for developers