Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Microformats is data format standards for embedding semantic information in XHTML documents. Dmitry Baranovskiy created a tranformer application that can output Microformatted semantic information into formats that are suitable for mashup (JSON and XML).

The application is open source, and is hosted on Google Code.

Here is the XML and JSON outputs of my Biosketch page.

The implementation is surprisingly simple but powerful. It relies on XSTL to transform Microformatted content from an XHTML file into JSON or XML. If you want use the application as a web service, follow the instructions here.

Image Matters LLC announced a new open source social bookmarking and mashup application called gnizr. This application project is currently hosted on Google Code under the Mozilla Public License.

The goal of this project: (1) Provide enterprises and individuals with an out-of-the-box mashup framework for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing Web resources. (2) Create an open source platform for exploring Semantic Web technologies in the context of Social Web. (3) Experiment how different mashup technologies can be brought together to enhance group collaboration and information sharing.

The gnizr design is heavily influenced by Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. It features a del.icio.us-like user interface for tagging and bookmarking. Users can create tag relations using SKOS vocabularies (broader, narrower, and related) and export their saved bookmarks in RDF (in SIOC and Tag Ontology). Saved bookmarks can be viewed in different mashup API (Google Maps, MIT SIMILE Timeline and Aduna Clustermap).

Gnizr Project: http://gnizr.googlecode.com

OpenURL is a framework for describing and transporting shared metadata about information objects on the Web. It’s a standard defined by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Why do we need OpenURL?

The OpenURL is needed because conventional web links do not take into account the identity of the user: they take all users to the same target. This causes some problems. For example, when more than one institution provides access to copies of the same electronic article, the link from citation to full text should resolve to a copy that is accessible to the user. Since different users have access to different digital libraries, the link should resolve in a user-specific fashion.

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Snoggle is a graphical, SWRL-based ontology mapper. It’s developed by folks at BBN Technologies. Ontology mapping is the process of aligning semantics between multiple ontologies. Many people believe that ontology mapping is an inevitable future of the Semantic Web because distinctive system ontologies need to aligned before data from different systems can be fused to achieve seamless semantic integration.

Snoggle attempts to solve the ontology mapping problem by providing a graphical user interface (similar to which of the Microsoft Visio) to guide the process of ontology vocabulary alignment. In Snoggle, user-defined mappings can be serialized into rules, which is expressed using SWRL.

Snoggle is an Open Source project with a standard BSD license. Latest source code and binaries are available for download at SemWebCentral.org.

The upcoming SOCoP meeting will feature a demonstration of the Snoggle tool. In particular, it will show how Snoggle can be used to solve ontology mapping problems in the geospatial domain.

Related links:

• Snoggle project home page
• SOCoP July 19, 2007 meeting announcement.

Central to the Semantic Web is a collection of RDF documents. Unlike the traditional HTML documents, RDF documents contain explicit semantic descriptions of Web resources (e.g., people, place and things). We all use web browsers to view HTML documents, but what do we use to view RDF documents?

A new site called zitgist.com is attempt to answer to this question. Developed by Frédérick Giasson at the OpenLink Software, Inc., zitgist allows users to browse any RDF documents on the Web and help them to navigate between resources that are linked in those documents.

In zitgist, RDF statements are display as groups of “tabbed” tables. When a RDF resource has nested resources, zitgist creates nested “tabbed” tables within the parent table. This is the typically behavior of RDF browsing. For some special RDF documents, zitgist plays a different trick.

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Uldis Bojars developed a new WordPress plugin to demonstrate the use of SIOC ontology. Similar to the WordPress built-in Import/Export function, this plugin also allows users to import posts from another WordPress blog and export posts for backup. However, it differs from the built-in function in that it uses the SIOC ontology — the WP built-in Import/Export function uses WordPress eXtended RSS (WXP).

There are several advantages in using SIOC as oppose to WXP.

1. Users can import any blog-like things into a WordPress site. As long as the import data source is expressed using the SIOC ontology, the plugin is able to construct WordPress blog posts from SIOC post objects (e.g., import messages from public forums as WP posts).
2. Introduce new vocabularies in SIOC data files will not break the plugin implementation. Because data files of SIOC are RDF documents, new namespaces and vocabularies can be added to SIOC data files without breaking the core function of the plugin. This capability is essential if developers want to extend SIOC data file and preserve the existing SIOC plugin implementation.