Semantic Web Company

Jordan S. Hatcher is, among other things, a lawyer, academic, and entrepreneur working on Intellectual Property and Internet law issues in the UK and worldwide. He is heavily involved in the Open Data Commons initiative. Last month he gave me an interview on IPR issues associated with data licensing. His brief answer to the question why data needs a seperate licensing framework:

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

There’s a lot to know about semantic standards, languages, technologies and their application, so last week I attended TopQuadrant’s first European training from Oct 5th to 9th in Amsterdam.

We kicked off with Eddy Vanderlinden elaborating on the lessons he learned from 30 years of work in the financial sector. He outlined how improvements could be achieved by using data models relying on semantic web standards. You can read about his ideas in this essay.

TQ’s chief scientist Dean Allemang then continued with his talk “Enabling Creativity at the Edge”. “The edge” refers to the boundary between an information system and the real world, where the end users of a system work. As business needs change faster and faster, the people working at the edge need to be able to adapt the company’s applications on their own and shape them to their everyday needs.

Dean Allemang

Nowadays end user often achieve this kind of creativity on the edge by using self-made spreadsheets. The problem with that is their lack of interoperability. These data from different spreadsheets, databases, reports, etc. are often connected through business processes that rely on repetitive and error prone human processing, like copying things from a spreadsheet to a database, creating a report and pasting its result into another system, and so on.

The result is a complex system with many heterogenous parts and an organisation that cannot possibly know what it knows.

As a solution Dean proposed to “think outside the table” and go beyond the relational database way of orgranising data. This of course can be achieved by integrating the data using semantic technologies. TopQuadrant’s software offers possibilities to do just that, and makes it possible to create highly customizable dashboards and applications that all rely on the same data.

During the following days we learned about the ins and out of using semantic standards and languages and tried out TopBraid tools in several hands-on excercises. The TopBraid Suite is a very powerful, commercial toolkit. It includes TopBraid Composer, Live and Ensemble. Composer is a semantic web modeling and application developement tool, that uses the Eclipse framework. TopBraid Live is a server for semantic applications built with TopBraid Ensemble. Ensemble is a graphical application assembly toolkit, that enables end users to create custom apps that run in a browser and use RDF data and data models – thereby allowing for the above mentioned “creativity at the edge”.

I am very impressed with the capabilities of these tools, they enable the user to realize manifold possibilities that come with using semantic web standards – and that without programming. You can see some of these tools in action and learn about applying semantic standards in a series of webcasts from Semantic Universe. For the latter topic you might also attend one of our webinars.

On the last day Dean coverd several case studies, like connecting ontologies to legacy data sources (using e.g. D2RQ inside Composer), applying semantic technologies to the customer service management of a larger retailer or using ontologies in Federal Enterprise Architecture.

All in all I am very happy to have attended TopQuadrant’s training and hope they will establish a successful series of trainings in Europe just as they did in the US.

[This article was written by guest author Aman Shakya and originally submitted as an entry in our LinkedData Vision Competition]

The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

With this vision, I am working on a social Semantic Web application called StYLiD (an acronym for Structure Your own Linked Data), now available at www.stylid.org. A basic demo video is also available at www.stylid.org/quickstart.php#video

It enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly. (more…)

Tell us your vision and win a full conference pass for LinkedData Planet 2008, worth $1095! The Semantic Web Company is an Association and Analyst Partner of this year’s LinkedData Planet conference, taking place on June 17-18, 2008 in New York. Keynote speaker include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen, Ian Davis, Anant Jhingran and Atanas Kiryakov will be among the Keynote speakers.

Here is what you need to do to enter the competition:

Send us a brief description of your vision of the impact that linking Open Data will have on business, politics and culture. Share with us your ideas how linking open data will change the world – with all the pros and cons involved.

We welcome ideas in the following categories:

• mashups
• search applications
• ontologies & schemas
• scenarios for lifestyles
• policies for the practice of linking Open Data

(more…)

Come share your expertise with linked data and semantic technologies and learn from others at LinkedData Planet in New York City (June 17-18, 2008).

In creating the modern generation of enterprise and web applications, we typically integrate information from multiple sources. Relating data from disparate sources presents a challenge of deriving information. However, semantic tools and technologies are evolving that enable us to understand information derived by linking data from different sources, including data from applications, databases, ontologies and content management systems. Semantic technologies and tools support techniques such as tagging online information to make it more readily accessible for data integration. This makes it easier to understand data in relation to other data, even if some of this data is inside your firewall, some is in a business partner’s system, and some is part of the growing collection of useful publicly available data on the web.

LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to:

• connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way
• extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking

(more…)

Today I booked my flight and hotel to stay in NYC. I am looking forward to going to the Linked Data Planet Conference. I will meet interesting people, listen to interesting talks (especially to the people from TopQuadrant, Kingsley Idehen and Timbl himself) and I will have fun in New York, it has been a while I´ve been in this great city.