Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

UMBC Ebiquity Group reports how W3C geo vocabulary is currently used in semantic web documents. The analysis is done using the statistics compiled by Swoogle — a Semantic Web search engine and crawler. Swoogle currently knows about 500,000 semantic web documents and 300,000,000 RDF triples.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Geo is currently the 10th highest ranked vocabulary according to Swoogle’s ontology ranking algorithm
• About 240,000 documents reference geo’s namespace
• Top used namespace abbreviation for this ontology is “geo”, “pos” and “wgs84_pos”
• Instances of geo:Point appear far more often in the range value of foaf:base_near property than all other referenced properties combined (close to 100,000 : 1).
• Property geo:long (longitude) and geo:lat (latitude) are often used by instances of geo:Point. Other instances that use these two properties include instances of the Airport class from airport-ont, geo:SpatialThing, dc:image, rdfs:Resource, foaf:Image, and foaf:Person. (see the full list for geo:long and the full list for geo:lat).
• Property geo:alt (altitude) is not used very often in comparison to geo:long and geo:lat.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Berners-Lee was challenged by Peter Norvig, Google Director of Search, at a recent artificial intelligence conference sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Tim’s belief is that in the future “Web developers will use semantic languages in addition to HTML. He stressed the importance of using persistent URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) for identifying information. Consistent use of these specifications, said Berners-Lee, will allow the Semantic Web to maintain the collaborative nature the World Wide Web was originally intended to have.”

At the end of Tim’s speech, Peter challenges Tim with the question that is it really feasible to get Web developers to use semantic languages, given that many of them can’t really configure web server and can’t write HTML?

Read the rest of this entry »