Tag Archives: Triplify

Jana Herwig

Bringing (Legacy) Data to the Web [WOD-PD]

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Linked Data & Open Data

The third session at WOD-PD was dedicated to “Bringing (Legacy) Data on the Web“, and led by Sören Auer (University of Leipzig, Germany) and Orri Erling (OpenLink Software) .

Sören Auer giving a talkSören 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

Orri Erling giving a talkWhat 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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Jana Herwig

AKSW release Triplify 0.4

by , Category: Tools & Software

A new release of Triplify, a web app plugin that converts queries to relational databases into RDF, JSON and Linked Data, was announced yesterday. According to AKSW’s blog (Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at Leipzig University), it comprises the following updates:

  • 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.

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Jana Herwig

Linked Open Data Triplification Challenge: Nominees are up, voting tool is online

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Conferences & Events

The nominees for the LOD Triplification Challenge are up! The challenge was organized as part of the preparations for the I-SEMANTICS 2008 conference and asked for submissions in the form of applications of Linked Open Data tools, RDF and Linked Data exporters, adoptions of configurations of Triplify for standard web applications, portings of the triplify script into other languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, Perl, ASP) and for applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users.

TriplifyTriplify 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

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Jana Herwig

Triplification Challenge – 3 more weeks to go!

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Conferences & Events

Together with this year’s I-Semantics conference, the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Research Group (AKSW) in Leipzig is organizing a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge. Submission deadline is in three weeks (30th of June).

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