Jena Ported to .NET

JenaNet "This is a port of the Jena2 Semantic Web API to the .NET framework. We will be converting the Java API into the .NET framework so as to gain the best Semantic Web engine possible."

Sun sponsored XML for Swing

JDNC At last.

Spotlight - Metadata Done Right?

Mac OS X Tiger: Search Technologies "The metadata engine makes searching smarter, more flexible and powerful by indexing the descriptive informational items already saved within your files and documents. Metadata describes the “what, when and who” of every piece of information saved on your Mac: the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size and many more details. Most documents, including Microsoft Word documents, Photoshop images and emails, already contain rich metadata items. By using this indexed information for searching, you can tap into tremendous power and accuracy for refining search results."

The list of file formats are fairly standard but the cool stuff is probably the API layers. Part of Spotlight. See also, Does Spotlight == BFS?.

The example screen shots show rendering Slashdot's RSS feed and they also claim support for Adobe Photoshop. So that seems to suggest a limited support support of RDF - RSS 1.0 and perhaps XMP. Back in 2003 I found mention of metadata in OS X; it's a shame it's taken this long ;-).

And the new 30" monitors save you money. Buy 10, buy 100...

Radar Networks Decloaks

Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind "As the global mind develops it will initially be focused around making information more useable. But that will be just the beginning. Already a new generation of tools that will bring the power of distributed intelligence to the desktop and the enterprise are being developed in labs such as HP, Cycorp and Network Inference. In addition to these projects, my company,Radar Networks has developed a complete platform in Java for developing and deploying Semantic Web applications for the desktop, enterprise and Web – most of our platform will be released as open-source code in 2005 as part of a research project we are working on for SRI (more news about this project in the future!). Following the initial open-source release, we plan to offer a commercial version of the Radar Platform as well as related applications, services, solutions and support for enterprises and developers."

"Of course for this to work lots of new infrastructure is required. There are also numerous issues that arise as soon as one digs deeper into the subject -- issues related to data synchronization, privacy and security, ontology integration, policies and many other subjects. My company, Radar Networks' software platform (to be released as LGPL in 2005) will provide an open-source framework that solves many of these problems and will enable the open community to collaborate to solve any that remain or are found in the future."

Danny beat me to it.

Accessing vs Naming Models

We recently had a use case where the directory where the triples were persisted moved to a different machine or where the host name of the machine frequently changed (moving from network to network).

Our existing scheme for naming models takes the form:
protocol://hostname/servername#modelname

Which usually becomes:
rmi://www.kowari.org/server1#model1

This is pretty brittle given the above use case. We've known for quite some time that our model naming scheme confused two distinctive properties:
* How to access the model, and
* The name of the model.

By ignoring this issue we could get around to adding views, security and the iTQL FROM and IN clause.

However, we now have the need to uniquely identify the model as well as continuing to support the old naming scheme. The currently proposed idea is to first map the URL of a model to a URN so that:
<rmi://fully.qualified.hostname/server1#model1>

Becomes:
<urn:fully-qualified-hostname:server1:model1>

This also allows us some added flexibility such that you can now have names for RSS feeds and external models that can be described using:
<urn:slashdot-org:news-rss> <access> <http://slashdot.org/news.rss>
<urn:my-com:server1:hr> <access> <rmi://localhost/server1>

The second entry refers to a local copy, which can be changed to:
<urn:my-com:server1:hr> <access> <rmi://my.com/server1#hr>

Which will access the live version of the database. It will break some of the current functionality in iTQL. This is where it creates a model on the fly if it happens to use an external model. For example:
select $s $p $o
from <http://slashdot.org/rss.xml>
where $s $p $o ;

This downloads the RDF and puts it in a model. Subsequent calls will be done against the local model. Also, iTQL doesn't implicitly have a default host so you must give it another way of giving the connection.

The simplest way is to create the mapping when creating a model:
create <urn:slashdot-org:rss-feed> <http://slashdot.org/rss.xml>

In the future, resolvers will have configuration settings so you could make statements such as:
<urn:slashdot-org:rss-feed> <updateOnlyIfChanged> <every 5 minutes>

Once created, it can then be accessed in the FROM:
select $s $p $o
from <urn:my-com:server1:hr> and <urn:slashdot-org:rss-feed> <rmi://my.com/server1>
where $s $p $o ;

This will do a set operation over the two listed models as defined in the Kowari/TKS server at "my.com".

However, this can get verbose so we'll probably borrow something from RDQL and the like and add a USING clause:
select $s $p $o
from <urn:my-com:hr> and <urn:pi-com:cal>
where $s $p $o
using <rmi://my.com/server1> ;

Or alternatively, we could set the server before doing a query using:
set server <rmi://localhost/server1> ;

To turn it from a local query to a distributed query (a TKS only feature):
set server <rmi://my.com/server1> for <urn:my-com:hr> ;
set server <rmi://pi.com/server1> for <urn:pi-com:cal> ;

Illegal iPod

Dirty rotten inducers - the law the IT world deserves? "It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street - and be arrested for carrying the iPod."

Prelude to a Fake Complaint "Apple's iPod music player seemed particularly vulnerable to attack. Any major record label could bring a strong lawsuit against Apple for "intentionally inducing" infringement under this new law with the iPod, both because it's plausible to argue that having an iPod enhances the lure of using P2P to download music (gotta fill all that space!) and because all the major record labels still believe that private sharing of songs from your CDs with friends is copyright infringement. We still disagree with the labels on these points, but the reality is that no court has yet convinced them that their legal theories are flawed. We also threw in Toshiba for making the iPod's hard drive and CNET for showing people how to move the iPod's music files."

Jena Jumble

* SWeDe "...OWL editor [and] integrates existing tools like the OWL Validator, Kazuki (OWL to Java code generator), and DumpOnt (Ontology Visualizer)." See also, using Kazuki (requires Jena).
* Introduction to Jena "RDF is increasingly recognized as an excellent choice for representing and processing semi-structured data. In this article, Web Developer Philip McCarthy shows you how to use the Jena Semantic Web Toolkit to exploit RDF data models in your Java applications."
* BRQL "This document describes the Bristol RDF Query Language, or BRQL (pronounced 'burkol'), designed to meet the requirements and design objectives described in the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) document RDF Data Access Use Cases and Requirements (and its working version). This query language is based on RDQL Member Submission."

Kowari Bloggers

Kowari "Even though I’ve never tried it, I already have quite an attachment for the Kowari triplestore, due to reading More News from Andrew Newman and Paul Gearon’s remarkable Working Notes - perhaps the most special-interest blog I’ve come across (recently featuring their battle with unclosed Tuples…)"

This seems like the ideal time to mention that Andrae is joing the Kowari blogging craze with Etymon.

Kowari on XML.com

A First Look at the Kowari Triplestore "Kowari is a solid tool created by an enthusiastic, knowledgeable team. That said, it's not for everyone: the architecture of the application is clearly focused on the server, and developers looking for an embeddable RDF store for desktop apps will likely want to look elsewhere, unless they are willing to add several megs to their applications. Kowari's dependence on Java is another possible sticking point for those developing tools using other frameworks. Documentation is brief and unfinished, but what's there is useful for the adventurous."

Updated documentation is going to be released to coincide with 1.0.4. Hopefully, this should make it a little more accessible to most.

"According to Tom Adams, "Our triplestore is really a quad store, the 4th tuple being the group/model that a triple belongs to.""

Apparently, I made this quote but it doesn't matter.

Paul said, "a better name might be "platypus"" - that was already taken by a previous project.

Semantic Clarity

Two related pieces dealing with integration and the Semantic Web.

Triple-based Computing "[Johanson & Fox, 2004] expect ubiquitous computing as the “killer app” for tuplespace-based computing because of the model’s portability, extensibility, flexibility, and ability to deal with heterogeneous environments...Since applications are decoupled in reference, time, and space many issues in protocol and process alignment disappear because they are provided by the underlying middleware that implements the tuplespace."

Semantic Web bringing clarity to the Universal Server concept "I would also like to conclude that what we know today, as the monolithic "point of presence" on the web called a "Web Site" (which infers browsing and page serving), is naturally going to morph into a different kind of "point of presence" that is capable of delivering the following from a single process:

1. Serve up Semantic Data from existing data sources
2. Provide execution endpoints for Web Services
3. Provide an instigation point for events that trigger Service Orchestratio

This is what Virtuoso is all about, and why it is described as a "Universal Server"; a server instance that speaks many protocols, delivering a plethora of functionality (Database, Web Services Platform, Orchestration Engine, and more)."

D2RQ

D2RQ - Treating Non-RDF Databases as Virtual RDF Graphs "Using D2RQ you can:
* access information in a non-RDF database using the Jena model API.
* query a non-RDF database using RDQL or find(spo).
* do RDFS and OWL inferencing over the content of a non-RDF database using the Jena ontology API.
* publish the content of a non-RDF database on the Semantic Web using the Joseki RDF server."

D2R is already integrated into TKS 2.0 and hopefully we'll get D2RQ in there. Good to see it using RDF for configuration.

News Services go RDF

Adobe and IPTC Collaborate on the Implementation of Metadata Standards for News Organizations " Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it is collaborating with the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to extend the capabilities of IPTC metadata through use of the open-standard, Adobe XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform). Based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, XMP is a specification expressed in XML that provides a standardized framework to capture and manage metadata, the information that describes files.

Photographers and news services around the world use IPTC metadata schemas to embed identifying characteristics such as captions, credits, location and time and dates within digital photos and scans. This information can be read by content management systems, used by virtually every newspaper publisher, to review and identify photos they want to publish to accompany a story. Adobe and IPTC also announced plans to develop future implementations that will be accessible via the Adobe(R) Creative Suite, and related point products including Photoshop(R) CS, through a customizable metadata user interface. This is intended to streamline the data capture process and allow relevant IPTC metadata to be preserved as the file is utilized across news and derivative workflows. "

Eve of Sleepycat

Apache Leader: Berkeley DB Java Edition Eases Hand-Rolling "In the case of the Apache Directory Project, Karasulu says the project members are so convinced that Sleepycat's pure-Java database will become the "de facto standard Java API for manipulating B-tree databases" that they're basing the project's pure-Java LDAP directory server, called Eve, on back-ends built using Berkeley DB Java Edition."

"Who's building applications in Java? Does it span the spectrum?

I think so. People can use a B-tree anywhere a fast, relatively constant time lookup is needed, regardless of the size of the data. This happens all over the place.

We're actually in the process of building an embeddable, pure-Java LDAP server called Eve. She's a beaut, introducing triggers and stored procedures to the world of LDAP. "

" What do you think of Berkeley DB Java Edition's performance capabilities?

It uses NIO [new input/output], which should have a considerable effect on performance due to the way memory is accessed. The NIO packages are new APIs that allow Java to have the power of C where IO is concerned. These APIs are new in the 1.4 JDK and make Java-based servers much more effective. Furthermore, a binding API makes mapping objects to records very intuitive while avoiding the overheads in serialization.

Other implementations often leave this up to users, who often use serialization and wind up paying for it with a massive performance hit. "

There was also a recent comparison between C++ and Java showing Java is faster in all but three tests.

The Next Web - Web Services

The Third Web "Web services represent the third attempt to rebuild enterprise IT on the standards-based foundation conceived by Tim Berners-Lee. To realize that vision, vendors and IT pros must resist some familiar temptations and avoid some traditional mistakes...But it would be a sad repetition of past errors if IT vendors seized upon the success of Web services as their latest excuse for locking customers into product stacks—perversely building proprietary structures from standards-based components, for example, by devising proprietary XML schemas for their applications and documents."

Scaling Taxonomies

Verity Announces New Content Classifier (with screenshot) "VCC is based on roles and rules. Roles include taxonomy experts, subject matter experts within the organization (e.g., chemists, engineers, human resources staff, etc.), editors, and publishers. The company says the workflow feature allows taxonomy and classification management to be distributed to subject matter experts who know the content, as well as to knowledge engineers who know and understand taxonomy development. Different people who serve different roles are assigned different permissions to alter categories. The company claims that VCC is the only software that enables such real-time collaboration between knowledge workers and subject experts.

VCC uses rules to define how documents should be classified. Once taxonomies have been set up, VCC automatically classifies new documents as spiders discover them. The customer can control automatic classification by defining how well VCC thinks a document matches a category. For instance, if VCC’s confidence level for a candidate category exceeds 70 percent, then automatically publish it into that category; if not, route the decision to an assigned knowledge worker. Verity calls this “automated classification with manual oversight.”

Verity worked with DuPont to develop VCC. Whitney said the company uses VCC to manage a 25,000 node taxonomy. Internal users include “everyone from a bench chemist to a knowledge engineer—whoever.” He said VCC provides DuPont with “frictionless review between highly specialized knowledge workers, many with PhDs, and the knowledge engineering staff.”"

Semantic Web for 5th Graders

This was an interesting find using the Google Catalog to search for the Semantic Web.

It says: "Twenty-two lessons show students how to build a vocabulary...(KWL, SQ3R, semantic web making, outlining)...". Of course, it doesn't look like it's *the* Semantic Web.

Searching for Java by itself reveals some interesting results. Searching for Java in the Computers category reveals no hits; the category function seems to be broken.

Global Scalability

Semantic Web: Hype-Bubble or an interesting research area? Links to a comment made by on the SUO list "In 6 years (1998 to 2004) with ENORMOUS hype and funding, the semantic web has evolved from Tim BL's book to a few prototype applications, which are less advanced than technologies of the 1970s such as SQL, Prolog, and expert systems -- and they're doing it with XML, which is far less advanced than LISP, which was developed in the 1950s."

There are many interesting responses in the thread including one from Frederick Kintanar: "...I do think the Web makes a big difference between earlier knowledge representation efforts and Semantic Web initiative. A big one is global scalability, where the key element is URI's (and their already deployed global acceptance). Hypertext was already a relatively mature technology in the research community, when Tim Berners-Lee hit upon what is needed to make it scalable: global identification..."

And no this isn't scaling a single agreed upon ontology across the Web.

Spicy Searching

IBM expands search push with Masala "The computing giant, based in Armonk, N.Y., is gearing up to release Masala, a new version of its DB2 Information Integrator software that will let corporate employees retrieve information from databases, applications and the Web at the same time. Subsequent improvements will include a data-mining component code-named Criollo."

"Microsoft, though, isn't standing still. It is working on its own distributed search plan with Longhorn and a new release of its SQL Server database, code-named Yukon, and plans to build its own Internet search service. BEA Systems and others are working on similar technology."

"Information Integrator is a software layer than can pull data from different software--Oracle databases, Microsoft Excel, IBM's own DB2 and Lotus databases--with a single query. IBM and other companies are touting this "federated" database approach, in which searches tap into spread-out data sources, as a potentially cheaper alternative to shipping and storing large amounts of information in a single database."

Ruined by Developers

How Microsoft Lost the API War Most of this is standard "how the Web has won" but there were a couple of interesting snippets.

"WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973."

"RSS became fragmented with several different versions, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting, and the attempt to clean everything up by creating yet another format called Atom has resulted in several different versions of RSS plus one version of Atom, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting. When you try to unify two opposing forces by creating a third alternative, you just end up with three opposing forces. You haven't unified anything and you haven't really fixed anything."

Loom and Drools

Loom is now open source (a BSD-like license). "Loom is a language and environment for constructing intelligent applications. The heart of Loom is a knowledge representation system that is used to provide deductive support for the declarative portion of the Loom language. Declarative knowledge in Loom consists of definitions, rules, facts, and default rules. A deductive engine called a classifier utilizes forward-chaining, semantic unification and object-oriented truth maintainance technologies in order to compile the declarative knowledge into a network designed to efficiently support on-line deductive query processing."

An article theServerSide.com introduces "...the JSR-94 Rules Engine API and an Open Source product called Drools, the forerunner implementation of this up-and-coming technology...it can scale to incorporate and execute hundreds of thousands of rules in a manner which is an order of magnitude more efficient then the next best algorithm." Drools Homepage.

WSDL2OWL-S 1.1 Released

WSDL2OWL-S "...provides a partial translation between WSDL and OWL-S. The results of this translation are a complete specification of the Grounding, partial specification of the Process Model and Profile and Daml Class file, when at least one of the input and output messages are of XSD Complex type." Download it here.

TKS the RDF Database

The Semantic Web in the Enterprise ""RDF provides a simple model to represent logical statements in the form of subject, predicate, object," said Daconta. "While this follows a linguistic approach, that same model can also represent resource, property, and value. This triple model is a powerful underpinning of more powerful languages layered on top of it like OWL."

He referenced one of his non-RDF projects that uses explicit database tables to make certain data associations. This approach is neither scalable nor flexible. The unique nature of RDF, however, can provide a flexible mechanism that would allow far greater associative capabilities, thereby increasing the ability to query and make inferences on topic matters not explicitly hard-wired into tables.

Daconta added that good strides have been made in commercial products supporting Semantic Web technologies, including RDF databases (such as Tucana Knowledge Server), ontology editors and inference engines (such as Network Inference's Cerebra Server), and data source integration engines (such as Unicorn System)."

The author is Ken Fromm from Loomia who are working on "a semantic technology software company building an RDF/FoaF-based identity and relationship stack".

Behind the Wall

Something Useful This Way Comes "Mike Champion offered an optimistic note, suggesting that Semantic Web technology may first flourish behind the enterprise firewall, in a way reminiscent of the earliest days of Netscape's corporate success:

The other previously missing ingredient is that real organizations have at least something approximating an implicit ontology in their database schema, standard operating procedures, official vocabularies, etc. It is at least arguable that the technologies that have emerged from the Semantic Web efforts allow all this diverse stuff to be pulled together in a useful way -- ontology editors, inferencing engines, semantic metadata repositories, etc. I'm seeing real success stories in my day job, and a coherent story is starting to be told by a number of vendors, analysts, etc.

Champion here makes a similar point to the one I argued in an article last fall ("Commercializing the Semantic Web"), namely, that there exist today several startups and fledgling ventures that are selling Semantic Web technologies to corporate clients, including Network Inference, Tucana Technologies, and others."

"Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh, because with WinFS Microsoft seems to be buying into the Semantic Web idea, or cry, because with WinFS Microsoft seems to be embracing-and-extending the Semantic Web idea. Oh well -- outside of the realm of unenforced US antitrust legislation, Microsoft is like gravity. Eventually, you just learn to work around it."

Semantic Web Tutorial

Tutorial on basic SW Technologies Nice to get mentioned in the same breath as Sesame, Redland, etc. (not quite with Jena which got two of its own slides). Links also included: graphical editors and the Semantic Web Application Survey

WinFS and RDF to Square Off?

Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS and semantics "Today's personal information systems are organized hierarchically. WinFS proposes that they be organized semantically. A number of observers have noted a family resemblance between RDF (Resource Description Framework) "triples" and WinFS relationships. An RDF triple, in geek-speak, is a subject-predicate-object relation. Sets of RDF triples can be (and Semantic Web people say must be) used to represent and organize knowledge."

Where do you get Longhorn today? RDF and schemas for RDF are available now. Taking the both bottom up and top down schemas and deployed locally and globally. Last year I asked, Should the RDF model be integrated into the File System?, the answer still seems to be 'yes'.

Danny has a good summary of part 1 of this discussion.

Can't get enough of the Semantic Web?

The Special Interest Group on Semantic Web and Information Systems. The first bulletin (PDF) is 75 pages of Semantic Web goodness. Includes interviews with Jim Hendler and Amit Sheth, where the SIGSEMIS is positioned, and various papers on the Semantic Web. There's also related events, an industry column (about Semagix Freedom) and book reviews.

Cynical Development

A fresh look at the waterfall "Analysis -> Dream, Design -> Guess and Waffle...Support -> Duck and Deny"

Sesame Speed

The KIM Platform: Performance and Scale "The result: a repository of 15M explicit statements, describing 1.2M entities, is manageable with an indicative upload speed of 1300 statements/sec...The experiment was performed on a 2xOpteron 240 (1.4GHz) server with 6GB of RAM - a $3000-worth, brandless machine. 64-bit beta-versions for Amd64 of Windows 2003 Server and JDK 1.5.0 were used."

iTQL evaluated

iTQL evaluation We do support optional match through the ugly sub-query syntax but apart from that I think Kendell has it right. Aliases allow you to shorten URIs.

Datalog and Inferencing

Implementing OWL Lite in rule-based systems and recursion-enabled relational DBs "The semantics of negation in stratified Datalog is not compatible with the semantics of negation in Description Logics...Alternative, more compatible semantics for negation in Datalog exist, namely well-founded semantics, that also relies on such a three-valued logics. However, this is not semantics available in SQL:1999 compliant databases. Well-founded semantics only regards the minimal model when computing negation, whereas Description Logics regard all possible models. Hence, they are also incompatible."

Two other related papers: Bubo - Implementing OWL in rule-based systems and Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic.

This maps well to 3VL and the recursive predicate functions trans and walk.

Not Relational Enough

Two recent articles about XML and database technology. One of the FAQs about Kowari is in respect to relational databases. Taking the pedantic view, the two databases mentioned are not relational but SQL. I've previously posted links about XML management systems too.

In, XML, the New Database Heresy "One of the major benefits of using XML in relational databases is that it is a lot easier to deal with fluid schemas or data with sparse entries with XML. When the shape of the data tends to change or is not fixed the relational model is simply not designed to deal with this. Constantly changing your database schema is simply not feasible and there is no easy way to provide the extensibility of XML where one can say "after the X element, any element from any namespace can appear". How would one describe the capacity to store “any data” in a traditional relational database without resorting to an opaque blob?

I do tend to agree that some people are going overboard and trying to model their data hierarchically instead of relationally which experience has thought us is a bad idea."

Edd Dumbill wrote in, Ron Bourret on XML and databases "My guess is that everything will pick up on this front in a year or two, with companies moving towards what I consider the holy grail of XML support in relational databases: native storage behind a first-class XML data type, XQuery support with extensions for (a) including relational data or SQL queries and (b) updates, SQL/XML support with extensions for embedded XQuery queries, and support for JSR 225 (see below)."

One of the aspects we've found in implementing TKS/Kowari was that it pays to stick closely to the relational model. Everything comes down to tuples and I think that the problems with putting RDF on top of SQL database is that they aren't relational or "relational enough" (whatever that means).

Actually, the DAWG is asking for comments, maybe ensuring that the queries are expressed in relational algebra. That should prevent things like NULL getting in there.

Why FOAF? Why XFN?

This is a fairly old blog entry (4 months) but I hadn't seen it before, it discusses another social software format, XFN.

Social software snippets "So Jonas poses a good question, why was FOAF invented? Perhaps an attempt to justify RDF? Is this an example of a solution looking for a problem? A clever acronym looking for a reason to exist?

Speaking of which, the biggest irony I see about FOAF is its name, which stands for "Friend of a Friend", and yet the technology has nothing to do with "friends". Like Jonas said, it's simply vCard recast in RDF, except for the "knows" relationship, which itself is quite meaningless (quite ironic for a Semantic Web effort), as it provides no more meaning than a plain hyperlink. Why work so hard for so little?

FOAF could be saved however, simply by adding an XFN module, thus enabling FOAF to finally fulfill its namesake, and represent friendship rather than just claiming to."

TCO of open source software

Weighing the costs of open source "While MySQL passed performance tests, the IT staff at the credit card processing company became concerned that MySQL didn't have enough formal support backing it up. What if the credit card processing company's databases failed, asked Tim Kelly, who serves as technical director of technology at TSYS.

"We were not prepared to deal with new support contracts and rely on an alternative database with our customer data." Tim Kelly director of technology, TSYS

"We have a procedure on how to roll back transactions when something goes wrong, but in the event that everything you try doesn't work and you look for support, there area million comments out there on the Web -- and newsgroup articles on MySQL -- but in production scenarios, you can't really rely on that," Kelly said.

Figuring out the total cost of ownership for a DBMS can be more complex than many companies expect at the outset, said Mike Schiff, vice president of data warehousing and business intelligence at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis.

"The cost of ownership isn't just the cost of acquisition or maintenance; it's also the vendor responsiveness when you've got a critical issue and downtime," Schiff said. "The cost of dollars to a company that has a database down can be staggering.""

RDF Data Access Use Cases and Requirements

No keeping your bananas unbruised but some pretty important use cases:
* 2.2 Finding Information about Motorcycle Parts (Supply Chain Management)
* 2.5 Avoiding Traffic Jams (Transportation)

More seriously, they don't mention beep but I would assume that the "web" in Semantic Web will mean the protocol will be http. Aggregate queries (4.5) might mean getting a FROM clause, or something like it, in the language.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-dawg-uc/