Semantic Technologies for E-Government

This was a recent one day seminar held by TopQuadrant at the White House Conference Center that included "...solution stories from both vendors of semantic technologies and agencies that are already using them in applications."

The preceedings included two papers: Semantic Technology Briefing and Ontology Myth or Magic.

The applications for semantic technology listed were "Answer Engine", "Automated Content Tagger", "Concept-base Search", "Connection and Pattern Explorer", "Content Annotator", "Context-Aware Retriever", "Dynamic User Interface", "Enhanced Query Search", "Expert Locator", "Generative Documentation", "Interest-based Information Delivery", "Navigational Search", "Product Design Assistant", "Semantic Data Integrator", "Semantic Form Generator and Results Classifier", "Semantic Service Discovery and Choreography"and "Virtual Consultant".

Also mentioned were ontology uses, comparison of tools, lifecycle, etc. and vendors like Ontoprise, Network Inference, Semagix, Lockheed Martin, Plugged In Software and Unicorn.

Shelly Powers' RDF book among others (actually most by Dieter Fensel) were listed (many of which I seem to have sitting on my shelf).

ISWC 2003

"In the context of new work on distributed computation, Semantic Web Services (SWSs) go beyond current services by adding ontologies and formal knowledge to support description, discovery, negotiation, mediation and composition. This formal knowledge is often strongly related to informal materials. For example, a service for multi-media content delivery over broadband networks might incorporate conceptual indices of the content, so that a smart VCR (such as next generation TiVO) can reason about programmes to suggest to its owner. Alternatively, a service for B2B catalogue publication has to translate between existing semi-structured catalogues and the more formal catalogues required for SWS purposes. To make these types of services cost-effective we need automatic knowledge harvesting from all forms of content that contain natural language text or spoken data."

The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge will be announced, papers and demos. Related to the Semantic Web Enabled Web Services homepage.

Pen Computing Destroys the English Advantage

Why pen computing could put you out of business "Being born in an English-speaking nation has, for the last century or so, meant never having to say you're sorry. People all over the world are still dying to try out their English on you... At some level, I'm all for technology lowering the linguistic barriers to communication and commerce...Globalisation is happening, for good or ill, bringing with it something we English-speaking first-worlders will just have to deal with: Tomorrow, we'll be a lot less special than we are today."

Enough Meta?

Metanology Joins Open-Source Tools Group "Our development team was able to produce an advanced programming tool with features that exceed those provided by non-Eclipse based competitors. Instead of spending our programming effort creating infrastructure, we were able to focus on the features of MDE that would create value for our users."

Uche Ogbuji wrote a paper called XML, The Model Driven Architecture, and RDF which briefly outlines MDA and suggests how RDF and RDFS could be used instead of XML and XSLT. UML 2.0 and RDF lists several other papers that maybe of interest.

Semantic Web Integration Start-Up

Metatomix(TM), Inc. Closes $8.3 Million Venture Round to Bring Real-Time Visibility and Integration Software Technologies to Commercial and Government Markets "Metatomix, founded in December 2000, has developed its Real-Time Visibility and SMARTE(TM) (Surveillance Monitoring and Real-Time Events) Suites based on its innovative application of Semantic Web-based architectures. The Semantic Web extends the Internet by allowing data-driven interactions to enable greater access to all types of information. This evolution extends the original Web concept of people interacting with computers to the sea changing philosophy of machines interacting with machines. Metatomix has harnessed this data-driven network computing technique to deliver real-time information integration and visibility software for commercial applications."

Metatomix has a piece of software they call the Hologram Store which "...is stored in a form that allows the data to be queried and coalesced from a variety of perspectives. The data is captured and expressed in Resource Description Framework (RDF), a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard that is a form of XML. By using this data format, new data sources are easily added without the requirement to redesign or reprogram the data model."

There's Gold in them thar Semantics

"Beyond the great wall of data on the Internet lies a goldmine for enterprises called the Semantic Web.

Based on standards pioneered by the W3C, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hewlett-Packard (Quote, Company Info) and a network of grassroots communities, the Semantic Web uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to piece together a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URLs for naming."

Teknowledge is featured. They hosted the AAAI-2002 and were mentioned before in relation to DARPA grants.

UDEF

e-Business & Web Services: The Missing Semantic Metadata Link "The Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) is a cross-industry metadata identification strategy designed to facilitate convergence and interoperability among e-business and other standards. The objective of the UDEF is to provide a means of real-time identification for semantic equivalency, as an attribute to data elements within e-business document and integration formats."

RDF in Cellphones

A recent discussion on RDFIG "I work for a cellphone firmware company, where I have been pitching the idea that we would be smart to start putting some semweb code into our product. If anybody is curious, I'd like to briefly describe my strategy and hear any feedback you folks might have...The internal marketing involves finding pre-deployment internal apps. A few of these are PIM data, putting timestamps and text annotations on photos and sound bites, and metadata descriptors for internal applets. There is a lot of interest in tracking user preferences."

Should the RDF model be integrated into the File System?

We had a recent "discussion" at work about the BeOS file system, NTFS and the advantages that metadata integration in the operating system brings. Most modern file systems (in the last 10 years) have had some metadata support: HPFS, BFS, Reiser4 and NTFS (in 2000 and above) and the forth-coming WinFS. There's even a proposal to extend OS X's metada support.

Interestingly, "...NTFS5 implements general indexing, which lets NTFS5 store arbitrary data in indexes and sort the data entries by something other than a name. NTFS5 uses general indexing to manage security descriptors, quota information, reparse points, and file object identifiers..."

For examples of the power that BeOS's implementation gave there's the very popular Tales of a BeOS Refugee. BeOS's file system and translators had a direct implication on how applications were developed.

Or is applying metadata to file systems similar to the definition of the Semantic Web: "An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy."

Results from Querying RDF

Recording Query Results "This document describes a way to record the results of queries where the queries are from languages that return bound variables. The recording of the results is in RDF, enabling graph comparison to be used for testing whether two sets of query results are equivalent."

I'm not sure whether I'd had read this before or not. It will be good to get a proper HTTP client in with Joseki support for Kowari.

Fractals (again)

Data visualisation: is it coming of age? "Fractal Edge's unique approach to data visualisation has enabled the power of the underlying data to be greatly enhanced. Data is better explained and understood within a defined vision or context. Huge volumes of rapidly changing information may be presented on screen in visual form without losing detail. Bottlenecks in the access and delivery mechanisms for data are eliminated. Data may be colour coded for ease of macro presentation and identification purposes and the structure of the data may be easily arranged depending on criteria important to the user.

Fractal Edge applications map data neutrally. They can aggregate multiple proprietary and third party data sources to bring a combined view of relevant sources of information. Basic adapters are available to CSV and Excel and more sophisticated adapters to Windows and Bloomberg, the financial data and market information providers. One-way and two-way links are available to data sources. Fractal applications allow launch of functionality from underlying applications."

WebFountain (again)

Here's another article on IBM's Web Fountain: " The result is a new online service called WebFountain. A big computer at IBM hoovers up web pages and information from other sources such as newsgroups, syndicated content and newswires. Each incoming page is analysed to determine what language it is in. The context—a news report, a page on a company's website, a web-log entry—is determined. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, proper nouns, place names and even entire phrases are extracted, and are analysed for positive or negative connotations. The page is also classified by category—is it about baseball, Iranian politics or global warming?"

Querying RDF

A TALES syntax for RDF "It is becoming increasingly important to have the ability to link documents along more dimensions than just hyperlinks and to specify partial metadata. The standard model for this is the W3C's RDF. Using RDF, a cross-planet, distributed relational system can be set up, relating resources by predicates...We feel that TALES provides a system for a concise, yet explainatory format for RDF queries. With the current plans for an RDF layer in Plone, it is felt that developing a good syntax for this tool to use in formulating its queries would be beneficial."

Pondering RDF Path "Most RDF Path proposals to date are sketchy, and do not provide clear equivalents of the facilities in XPath, or do not account for the fact that selections of a resource occuring as a node and an arc causes problems."

RDF-Rules mailing list.

RDFT

RDF Templates "RDF Templates (RDFT) are an XML format for creating representations of RDF graphs. In a similar way to XSLT, RDF Templates define template rules with patterns which are matched against nodes. Template rules specify output actions and further node selections which trigger further template operation. However, instead of acting on an XML tree, RDFT acts upon an RDF graph. Nodes are specified using a 'nodepath' syntax which defines conditional node/arc/node graph traversals. A macro definition facility is provided to reduce long nodepaths to easier to read strings."

The Future is Open

IBM Pushes Mainstream Linux Acceptance With New Television Ad links to an advertisement by IBM on Linux.

The transcript includes quotes such as "I think you should see this...It’s just a kid.", "One little thing can solve an incredibly complex problem.", "Knowledge amplification. What he learns, we all learn. What he knows, we all benefit from.", "Plumbing, it’s all about the tools." and "THE FUTURE IS OPEN". Remind you of anything else?

Scooping Yourself

"TKS has been available commercially for two years, but is in the final stages of release under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. Release under the MPL is anticipated in October, 2003."

Cool, this isn't the currently distributed version of TKS either. This is the new, you-beaut 64-bit version, with streaming results and disk based queries. In the next few days there should be some more information about this. I'd like to get some sort of paper for WWW2004 done - maybe based on the data structured used to store RDF.

The current name I like is ocelot.

Reading

Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java is one of a few Open Content books available for download written by Mark Watson. Of interest was the small sections on finding paths in graphs and WEKA.

3store: Efficient Bulk RDF Storage.

HT03 Complete List of Papers includes: The Connectivity Sonar: Detecting Site Functionality by Structural Patterns, Which Semantic Web?, Finding the Story - Broader Applicability of Semantics and Discourse for Hypermedia Generation, Collage, Composites, Construction, and Refinement of TF-IDF Schemes for Web Pages using their Hyperlinked Neighboring Pages.

AAMAS'03 Workshop on Web Services and Agent-based Engineering includes: Semantic web services interaction "For this purpose, we propose in this paper a new paradigm for cooperation and coordination between web services disguised as software agents.", KAoS Semantic Policy and Domain Services: An Application of DAML to Web Services-Based Grid Architectures "KAoS is a collection of componentized services compatible with several popular agent and distributed computing frameworks, including Nomads [21; 22], the DARPA CoABS Grid [17], the DARPA ALP/Ultra*Log Cougaar framework [29], Brahms [20], Voyager [30], CORBA [31]—and now GT3." (they plan to move to OWL), Brokerage for Mathematical Services in MONET "We describe here the approach to service brokerage being explored as part of the MONET project, whose larger aim is to demonstrate the applicability of the semantic web to the domain of mathematical software." and Composing Workflows of Semantic Web Services.

Streaming XML

"The Streaming API for XML (StAX) parsing will specify a Java-based, pull-parsing API for XML. The streaming API gives parsing control to the programmer by exposing a simple iterator based API. This allows the programmer to ask for the next event (pull the event) and allows state to be stored in a procedural fashion."

More information: JSR 173 Streaming API for XML, Specification and Reference Implementation and an article from Oracle comparing DOM, SAX and StAX Parsing.

Will the Role of the Relational Model Expand or Contract?

"If you're reading this and thinking "all he's saying is that lucene is useful for indexing xml fragments," you're halfway there. And If you're an XML lunatic who then says "Hey! Wow! And the world, in its entirety, is entirely composed of XML (or possibly RDF) fragments," then you've gone way too far. What I know is that the world is mostly made up of semi-structured data and I know that database schemas often evolve at a ferocious rate because, when we impose more structure, we often get it wrong.

And so now what I'm wondering is if I was completely off base in 1997. That is, I'm wondering if Moore's law really says that relational databases are going to become vastly less important over time, because for most applications there's a less-structured (and less efficient) way to do things that's more convenient for the programmers."

Whither (wither) the Relational Database

Well, being a Semantic Web blogger I'd have to say that the relational model, as it is applied in RDF, is only going to increase in usage not decrease. Things like JDBM (used for the backend of LDAPd) and hopefully TKS will become increasingly commoditized into being just something you throw in like logging.

What's in a name?

I'm trying to think of what to call an open source project. I started thinking of Australian animals, especially ones that start with "j" like jumbuck or jabiru. Jabiru was good because it's the biggest stork, stork -> store, wading in data, etc. I got all excited over "tyuk" which sounds like "chook" as both mean chicken. Lots of chicken references. Pretty sad. Any ideas? Taipan? Cod? Krill?