Andreas Blumauer: “I think this year’s I-Semantics was a big step forward. I had the impression that a lot of industry representatives are looking again for serious solutions there, after they have had already “burned their fingers” with the first-generation semantics. The now presented 2nd generation is much more about running applications and less unproven concepts.”

Tassilo Pellegini: “This is what I also noticed this year. People build now on a solid common knowledge on the topic and are much more aware of the possibilities of the existing technologies and methods. And as this conference also where visited by a quite international crowd, a very homogeneous discussion incorporating a lot of the international trends was possible. So the developed sight on the topic was quite clear. In this respect, the keynote of Peter A. Gloor was a notable and impressive look into the very next future. It seems that the powerful technique of Cool Farming will be on our agenda in the next years, when we talk about prognosis tools, sentiment analysis, aggregated expert’s data, etc.”

Andreas Blumauer: “In terms of a look into the very next trends, also the Keynote of Rafael Sidi was impressive to me, as he draw a real amazing picture how his company Elsevier is on the way to transform their whole business model into a new paradigm. And this gives a glue that LOD has now arrived in real industry environments.”

Tom Schandl: “I think this real-live-aspect of the Semantic Web was one of the unspoken focal points of the conference. In this respect Richard Cyganiak had a brilliant talk about how corporate data integration can benefit from RDF-Solutions, because a RDF based data concept can be developed step-by-step in contradiction to a “conservative corporate data integration” which always goes with a general redesign of the whole data-structure of a company. Richard calls this “pay as you go” – and I think this is what the industry looks for.”

Helmut Nagy: “This is also my impression, standing a lot on our booth. The industry looks for very concrete semantic solutions – and some of them are already there and ready to use. So – to carry some house advertising – our PoolParty demozone was very well recognised and commented. And this is not only because I served Tropical Banana Cocktail there.”

So the talk went on, in the car, at the blogosphere in the Semantic Web Community.

The New York Times, Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe sponsor the Triplification Challenge 2010 taking place at the I-SEMANTICS Conference from 1 – 3 September 2010 in Graz / Austria. Together they have provided 3.000 Euro in prize money which will be given to the  most promising application demonstrations and approaches built upon Linked Data.

The Challenge is organized by an international consortium consisting of Juan Sequeda (University of Texas at Austin), Bernhard Schandl (University of Vienna), Sören Auer (University of Leipzig), Ivan Herman (World Wide Web Consortium), Tassilo Pellegrini (Semantic Web Company Vienna) and patroned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Participants can choose between an open track and a special NYT track.

The open track sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe encourages submissions that fit into one or more of the following categories:

• novel data sets that are published as part of the Web of Data, according to Linked Data principles, and demonstrating potential benefit of use within applications;
• novel generic mechanisms, approaches, and technologies that convert certain types and formats of information into triples, interlink them to other data sets, and expose them as Linked Data;
• applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users such as for information syndication, specialized search, browsing, or augmentation of content.

The NYT track invites submissions that make use of the Linked Data published at data.nytimes.com and one or more government datasets that relate to politics. Any dataset qualifies that is produced by any government in the world that would be of interest to a constituent of that government. These can range from the demographics of election districts to campaign finance to corporate spending on political messaging.

The submission deadline for both tracks is 18 May 2010.

All submissions will be reviewed by an international program committee from industry and academia electing two winners in the open track and one winner in the NYT track.

For detailed information on the Triplification Challenge visit

http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/triplification-challenge or

http://triplify.org/Challenge/2010

Cordial thanks to our sponsors:

A common objection from critics of the semantic web is that regular users or webmasters won’t go to the trouble of marking up their content or whole web sites with RDF.
While it is obvious that nobody is going to decorate their web pages with hand-carved RDF triples, it is also apparent that a lot of the current web’s pages are generated by transforming information from relational databases to HTML pages, which are perfectly suited for human consumption, but which suffer from a big loss of machine-readable semantics.

As the information in the relational databases is highly structured and contains rich semantics, it is only natural to also use the already existing structured data to generate RDF representations of the same information.

Triplify is all about this approach of bootstrapping data for the semantic web. It does this for web applications which are built on PHP and MySQL.
Triplify consists of a lightweight PHP script and a configuration file. The latter is used to do the mapping of the columns of an application’s relational database to appropriate RDF classes and properties.

In many cases a site administrator who wants to export her site’s content as RDF, only has to save Triplify with a premade configuration file for her site’s application into the right folder, as for many popular applications like WordPress, Joomla! or phpBB all the work has already been done.
Once installed, Triplify can be used to generate a dump of the site’s complete RDF graph, or to generate Linked Data, as each of the site’s main concepts’ RDF graph is provided under its own URL, e.g. the semantic description of a user with the ID 123 can be accessed under http://yoursite.com/triplify/user/123.

If no configuration for an application exits, it is fairly easy to create one by yourself.
All one has to do is to look at the app’s database schema, find appropriate classes and properties from well known ontologies and create MySQL queries that grab the data from the relational database and map them to RDF classes or properties.
An example for a query that takes the data from a table describing the user of a CMS:
"SELECT id, name AS 'foaf:name', url AS 'foaf:homepage', short_description AS 'dc:abstract' FROM user_table",

Triplify’s creator Sören Auer kindly gave us the opportunity for an interview:

Triplify is very easy to configure for web developers. For which scenarios would you recommend to use Triplify, and in which situations other approaches of semantifying your data might be more suitable?

As you already mentioned Triplify was primarily developed for Web applications developed in PHP. These usually have a relatively small and simple set of tables. Triplify creates complete RDF exports, Linked Data or JSON, but does not include SPARQL endpoint functionality. When SPARQL is required you are better off with D2R Server or Virtuosos RDF views.

Triplify creates semantic representations of the data in relational databases. Do you think there would also be benefit in the inverse approach i. e. creating an application that parses triples and writes it to a relational DB according to a mapping file?

In certain scenarios this might make sense, but for the most cases I think the database schema has to be developed separately. Database schemata contain more storage and retrieval oriented information, such as for example about data indexing. Vocabularies and ontologies on the other hand represent information on a conceptually higher level and are more flexible with regard to evolution of the information structures than databases.

Are there plans for further development of Triplify?

Sure. We want to add SPARQL support and possibly port Triplify to other scripting languages such as Ruby and Python.

Thank you Sören, we will stay tuned about the news from your great application and look forward to the Triplification Challenge 2009!

The challenge (Patron: Sir Tim Berners-Lee) is open to anyone interested in applying Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. We envision submissions such as following:

• Applications of Linked Data tools and techniques such as for example Triplify, Virtuoso or D2RQ on custom Web applications and data sets exposing a large quantity and variety of content.
• Implementations of exporters and mappers from existing content repository formats (such as mbox mailing list archives, Bib Te X, XML-Schemes etc.) into RDF and Linked Data.
• Adoptions / configurations of Triplify for standard Web applications, such as for example Wikis, Weblogs, Webshops, Forums, Web-Gallery, ERP/CRM systems and Web-calendar software. You can find popular Web applications for example at Source Forge.
• Portings of the Triplify script into other Web application programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, ASP. The Triplify script is very small (<300 lines of code) however, the port should be as compatible as possible with the current reference implementation but integrate well with the environment given by the programming language.
• Applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users such as for information syndication, specialized search, browsing or augmentation of content.

Submissions should consist of a two page description in JUCS format of the application, accompanied by (a link to) the software source code and a link to an online demo. The descriptions should be submitted electronically via email to Michael Hausenblas with the subject Triplification Challenge Submission by May 30th, 2009.

Sören Auer described the difference between the Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 as follows: On the Web 1.0, you had many websites that provided unstructured, mainly textual content. On the Web 2.0, you have a few large websites that are specialised on specific content types. And, finally, on the Web 3.0, there are many websites which contain, and are able to semantically syndicate, arbitrarily structured content.

So why would we need another web? What you cannot do with the current web is finding answers to seemingly complex, yet in reality pretty mundane question such as: Where in Leipzig do I find an apartment that is close to bilingual, German-French child care facilities? Are there any ERP service providers which have offices in Vienna and Berlin? Who are the researchers in South-East Asia currently working on database related topics?

Sören further discussed three of the present means of bringing relation data to the web: Triplify (a web application plugin that exposes data from relational databases in RDF), D2RQ (a declarative language to describe mappings between relational database schemata and OWL/RDFS ontologies, developed at Free University Berlin), and Virtuoso Universal Server (a middleware and database engine hybrid delivering for instance data integration for SQL, RDF, XML, Web Services). With respect to Triplify, Sören – who is Triplify’s founder and main developer at AKSW Uni Leipzig – showed and discussed the configuration for WordPress 2.1., which can be found here (click here for more configurations, e.g. for Joomla, OpenConf and Drupal). The next aim for Triplify is to become an integral part in enduser web app distibutions.

And important question raised by Sören was: How do next generation search engines know that something has changed on the web of data? He suggested three approaches:

1. Always try to crawl everything (this may sound silly – but that’s actually what is happening on the current web)
2. Ping a central update notification service – e.g. PingTheSemanticWeb.com – which works as a showcase, but will probably not scale if the data web gets really deployed.
3. Each linked data endpoint publishes an update log – e.g. with Triplify, as a special folder inside the Triplify namespace, e.g. http://example.com/Triplify/update

Also discussed by Sören and worth checking out is Reuters’ Semantic proxy – the demo went live in late September.

Orri Erling, as the lead developer of the Virtuoso Team, addressed the issue of mapping relational databases to RDF with OpenLink Virtuoso. In his talk, he addressed the pros and cons of RDF data warehouse:

Pros

• Even query performance across all data
• Possibility of forward-chaining inference
• Some SPARQL features may be better supported, e.g. Unspecified predicates

Cons

• Keeping data up-to-date
• Complex set up, needs dedicated servers: you don’t build them on a whim

What Virtuoso delivers is mapping of SPARQL to SQL against any existing schema (whether stored in Virtuoso or elsewhere); a physical quad-store (quad as in quadruple; not as in quad-bike ; and Federated/local Relational Data Base Management Systems (RDBMS).

A more detailed discussion of the requirements for Relational-to-RDF Mapping is available on Orri’s blog, where he discusses it in the light of his own experience. A power point presentation of a previous talk he gave to the W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group can be downloaded here: Mapping Relational Databases to RDF with OpenLink Virtuoso (PPT, 115KB). His summary of the group discussions around the same topic, Requirements for Relational to RDF Mapping, can be found here.

Orri also showed the Virtuoso billion triples demo which, according to the corresponding blogpost, “is being worked on at the time of submission and may be shown online by appointment.” The demo was a submission to the Billion Triples Challenge.

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• Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge at I-Semantics 2008
• Virtuoso Universal Server

• update log functionality* added – allows Semantic Web crawlers to get incremental updates, see http://triplify.org/vocabulary/update
• linked data publication now also works without Apache’s mod_rewrite
• Syntax for indicating objectProperties added, e.g.:SELECT id,user_id 'sioc:has_creator->user'
• Additional metadata can now be added via $triplify[’metadata’]
• The configuration variable $triplify[’CallbackFunctions’] allows programmatic post processing of DB content

Further details can be found on the Triplify homepage: Triplify vocabulary update.

Triplify itself is a small web application plugin – its crucial parts consisting of roughly 200 lines of code – currently only implemented in PHP. It is based on the definition of relational database queries for a specific web application in order to retrieve valuable information and to convert the results of these queries into RDF, JSON and Linked Data. More information about Triplify can be found here.

On to the nominees: Eight of the submissions were nominated and can now be voted on using the poll widget on the nominations page. The nominees are:

1. Automatic Generation of a Content Management System from an OWL ontology and RDF import and export by Alastair Burt, Brigitte Jörg.
   URL: www.lt-world.org/triplify
2. Integrating Triplify into the Django web application framework and discover some math by Martin Czygan.
   URL: pcai042.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:9103
3. Linked Movie Data Base by Oktie Hassanzadeh, Mariano Consens.
   URL: www.linkedmdb.org
4. Interlinking Multimedia Data by Michael Hausenblas, Wolfgang Halb.
   URL: sw.joanneum.at/CaMiCatzee
5. Showcases of light-weight RDF syndication in Joomla! by Danh Le Phuoc, Nur Aini Rakhmawati.
   URL: swm.deri.org/jsyndication
6. Semantic Web Pipes Demo by Danh Le Phuoc.
   URL: pipes.deri.org
7. DBTune by Yves Raimond.
   URL: dbtune.org
8. Triplification of the Open-Source Online Shop System osCommerce by Elias Theodorou.
   URL: triplify.org/vocabulary/oscommerce

Detailed information can be found in PDF outlines on the nomination page – and don’t forget to vote! The final decision about the winners of the challenge will be made by the organizing committee.

The prizes will be awarded at I-SEMANTICS 2008, 3–5 September 2008, Graz, Austria, which is part of TRIPLE-I, a joint venture of three conferences (I-SEMANTICS, I-KNOW, I-MEDIA).

Related post:
Sören Auer: Triplification Challenge Nominations

The challenge aims at expediting the process of revealing and exposing structured (relational) representations, which already back most of the existing Web sites, as well as raising awareness in the Web Developer community and showcasing best practices.

The challenge awards attractive prices (MacBook Air, EeePC, iPod) to the most innovative and promising semantifications. The prizes are kindly sponsored by OpenLink Software [2], Punkt.NetServices [3] and InfAI [4].

More Information about the challenge can be found at:
http://triplify.org/Challenge

With Triplify, AKSW want to overcome the present dilemma of the Semantic Web: Even though significant research and development efforts are undertaken, the growth of semantic representations is still outpaced by the growth of traditional web pages – to an extent that one might be skeptical about the potential success of the Semantic Web.

Within the Semantic Web initiative a number of standards and techniques were developed supporting the encoding and exchange of structured information and knowledge on the Web. And that’s the core of the Triplify approach – exploiting structured relational representations behind Web applications for creating a critical mass of semantic representations on the Web. Read more on our homepage.

Related pages:
Triplify.org
i-Semantics Triplification Challenge