Pinging the Semantic Web
In the blogosphere, there are ping services like Ping-o-Matic and technorati ping for notifying search engines about blog updates. Ping services are extremely useful. They made easy for search engines to discover new blogs and their changes. Also, they helped individual blog owners to spread information and attract more readers.
As the Semantic Web grows, we also need similar services. Ping.SemanticWeb.Org is an experimental service for notifying search engines (or semantic web bots) about changes made in semantic web documents.
The present service accepts pings from semantic web documents that describe SIOC, FOAF and DOAP. SIOC is an ontology for describing discussion forums and posts in online community sites. FOAF is an ontology for describing people and their social network relations. DOAP is an ontology for describing open source projects on the Web.
The Semantic Web ping services are interesting for the following reasons.
First, Semantic Web search engines like Swoogle have depended on web crawling and user submissions to discover new SWD and their updates. As the Semantic Web grows, the overheads associated web crawling will be computational costly. I think a Semantic Web ping service can help to reduce this cost and simplify the underlying SWD discovery implementation.
Second, a wide adoption of ping services can help to speed up the convergence of standard ontologies. In the blogosphere, we have seen the convergence of few RSS standards, which I believe is due to the wide adoption of ping services, as well as RSS readers and blog publishing software. If Semantic Web ping services are widely used, I believe it’s only nature for SWD publishers to adopt few standard ontologies that are supported by the ping services, and not to create the owner ontologies.
Third, information published by the Semantic Web ping services will complement the information published by the existing blogosphere ping services. In the current blogosphere, when a ping server receives a notification, the server can only infer that the source of the ping requester has changed and has little or no knowledge about the kind of knowledge has changed.
With Semantic Web ping services, however, additional semantic knowledge can be learned — for example, the specific type of the content information. From the Ping.SemanticWeb.Org main page, you see the updates of SWD are categorized into SIOC, FOAF and DOAF. In the future, we may be able to draw additional logical inference about the specific relations between different links, documents and users. Perhaps, this will lead to other interesitng research such as social networks and web-of-trust.
Very cool. I’m a bit concerned about the REST API accepting HTTP GET requests though. Doesn’t this violate the HTTP rule about GET being side-effect free?
Comment by Richard Cyganiak — August 15, 2006 @ 1:18 am
The REST API docs state that the RDF document URL should be “encoded” (which means %-encoded, I guess?), but in the example, the URL is simply appended without any encoding. I tried to send both encoded and unencoded URLs, and only unencoded seems to work. Please make this consistent.
Also, the page doesn’t seem to include any contact information, only a copyright notice, which doesn’t tell me where to go with technical issues like this.
Comment by Richard Cyganiak — August 15, 2006 @ 1:41 am
[...] Fuente: Geospatial Semantic Weblog (Vía Planet RDF) [...]
Pingback by despuesdegoogle » Archivo del weblog » Ping en la web semántica — August 15, 2006 @ 3:34 am
Hi Richard!
Thanks for your interest in that new web service.
#1 what do you refer to with: “HTTP rule about GET being side-effect free”?
#2 for the encoding, it is a little bit tricky. The thing is that there is a bug in mod_rewrite when it tries to decode the “%2F” characters to apply a RewriteRule… You can refer to that blog post to know more about the problem. But you just remembered me that it was a problem and not all characters should be encoded, but only the set of reserved URI characters (”;” | “/” | “?” | “:” | “@” | “&” | “=” | “+” | “$” | “,”) (excepted “/” naturally).
However, I suggest to use escaping functions like “escape” in JavaScrip that doesn’t encode this character.
In that case, I have two choices: or a leave it that way with that give me beautiful URL, or I get rid of the RewriteRules related with the REST (GET) requests.
Also, I’ll add contact information on the page
Thanks!
Take care,
Salutations,
Fred
Comment by Fred — August 15, 2006 @ 7:51 am
Hi again,
This is just to let you know that I fixed the issues: #1 explicited what have to be escaped in the API text (for the moment) and #2 added contact information.
Thanks!
Salutations,
Fred
Comment by Fred — August 15, 2006 @ 8:38 am
[...] SIOC is an ontology for describing information from online community sites. You can read about SIOC and its applications in my past posts. [...]
Pingback by Geospatial Semantic Web Blog - GIS Data Integration, Geo Ontology, Geo Tagging & Geo Web 2.0 News » Blog Archive » SIOC Exporter for WordPress v1.19 — September 13, 2006 @ 2:12 pm
[...] example, I found this post about “Pinging the Semantic Web” by Harry Chen. In it he mentions there’s a lot to be learned from the blog pinging [...]
Pingback by Blank (Media) Slate » Blog Archive » Semantic Ping-o-Matic — March 20, 2007 @ 7:24 am