I have given (part of) a tutorial on semantic modelling for the XMLHolland community on February 25th. Course material about my part (about Semantic Web technology) is available online at:
My presentation is available on SlideShare, and embedded below:
The W3C OWL Working Group has just published a set of eleven documents for public review. These documents cover “OWL 2“, which is now fairly stable. This is a good time to review this work and send us comments (at public-owl-comments@w3.org). Comments received by 23 January will be answered and taken into account in the next round of publications. The group expects to issue the OWL 2 Candidatate Recommendations, with a call for implementations, shortly after that comment deadline.
The documents are:
1. Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-syntax-20081202/
2. Direct Semantics
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-semantics-20081202/
3. RDF-Based Semantics
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-rdf-based-semantics-20081202/
4. Conformance and Test Cases
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-test-20081202/
5. Mapping to RDF Graphs
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-mapping-to-rdf-20081202/
6. XML Serialization
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-xml-serialization-20081202/
7. Profiles
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-profiles-20081202/
8. Quick Reference Guide
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-quick-reference-20081202/
9. New Features and Rationale
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-new-features-20081202/
10. Manchester Syntax
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-manchester-syntax-20081202/
11. rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rdf-text-20081202/
Of these eleven documents:
* The first seven are the core technical specification for OWL 2.
Six of these now at “Last Call”. This means the Working Group
believes the design is done and that the only changes going
forward will be editorial, along with certain items highlighted
as “at risk” in the documents. The other one, “RDF-Based
Semantics” (which specifies OWL 2 Full) is expected to proceed
to Last Call shortly.
* The “Quick Reference Guide” and “New Features and Rationale” will
be a good place to start for many OWL users, these documents will
be a good place to start. (A Primer is also being developed, and
a earlier draft was published, but it has not yet been updated to
account for the current state of the language.)
* “Manchester Syntax” specifies an alternative syntax for OWL
which some users prefer and some tools implement, but which is
not required.
* “rdf:text” specifies an XML datatype (developed jointly with
the RIF Working Group) which provides a way to deal with RDF
language-tagged literal strings without making them be a
special case.
Again, please send comments to public-owl-comments@w3.org by 23 January.
Discussion on either of these lists is fine, but might not be seen by the Working Group.
Last thursday I gave a talk at the University of Manchester KR course (Bijan Parsia and Sean Bechhofer) about issues for knowledge representation in the legal domain. The slides are online here.
Yesterday I was playing around with Peter Mika’s BuRST to create an RSS 1.0 feed of the publications of the Leibniz Center. We already use bibtex2html to generate a weekly update of our publications page.
BuRST services are used, amongst others, by the openacademia.org project to generate RSS feeds of the documents in their RDF triple store. See also Ivan Herman’s blog post on this subject.
However, the RSS generated by BuRST is targeted at RDF-aware clients, and does not contain the Dublin Core metadata used by RSS viewers such as Thunderbird, Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes or Mail (Leopard) to show human readable information.
The BuRST service at openacademia.org uses a BibTex to RDF perl script by Michel Klein to generate a SWRC compliant RDF description of bibliographies stored using the BibTeX format. I have modified his script in such a way that it can now generate simple lightweight RSS representations of BibTeX files.
Voila: bib2rss.pl
You can download it, and use it at your choosing (Michel has GPL-ed the original).
Some examples:
Publications of the Leibniz Center, as RSS 1.0 feed
http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/cgi-bin/bib2rss.pl?url=http://svn.leibnizcenter.org/svn/LeibnizBib/trunk/leibniz.bibPublications of the Leibniz Center, as RSS 1.0 feed with title and description
http://draco.leibnizcenter.org/cgi-bin/bib2rss.pl?url=http://svn.leibnizcenter.org/svn/LeibnizBib/trunk/leibniz.bib&title=LeibnizPubs&description=Publications%20of%20the%20Leibniz%20Center
Some issues:
