Category — Semantic Web

The Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group has published its report “Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web”. The abstract of the report reads as follows:

In this report we present requirements for better defining the challenge of reasoning with and representing uncertain information available through the World Wide Web and related WWW technologies.

Specifically the report:

• identifies and describes situations on the scale of the World Wide Web for which uncertainty reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting useful information,
• identifies methodologies that can be applied to these situations and the fundamentals of a standardized representation that could serve as the basis for information exchange necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used,
• includes a set of use cases illustrating conditions under which uncertainty reasoning is important,
• provides an overview and discusses the applicability to the World Wide Web of prominent uncertainty reasoning techniques and the information that needs to be represented for effective uncertainty reasoning to be possible,
• includes a bibliography of work relevant to the challenge of developing standardized representations for uncertainty and exploiting them in Web-based services and applications.

The report identifies various areas which require further investigation and debate.

Beyond the new documents that the OWL Working group has just published (see the separate blog), the OWL Working group has also republished the three working drafts originally published in January, ie, the Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax, the Model-Theoretic Semantics, and the Mapping to RDF Graphs. The technical content of these documents has not changed, except for the name change to “OWL 2” from the (previous) “OWL 1.1”.

The OWL Working Group recently held an extremely successful Face to Face meeting at which numerous outstanding issues were resolved, including the issue of what to call the extended version of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that they are developing: it will be called OWL 2. It was felt that although the new language will be fully backwards compatible with the original OWL (modulo bug fixes and a possible change to annotation semantics), the new features and revisions to the specification warranted a change in major version number, and would also usefully distinguish a new standard from the OWL 1.1 Member Submission. The Working Group also decided to publish First Public Working Drafts of three more documents that will form part of the OWL 2 specification: XML Serialisation, Profiles and Primer. These provide, respectively, an XML syntax, a set of sub-languages that can be more simply and/or efficiently implemented, and an approachable introduction to OWL 2. The profiles document is particularly interesting as the defined sub-languages have some very attractive properties: one is a maximal subset for which polynomial time reasoning is still possible; one allows for implementation using relational database technology; and one allows for implementation using rule-based technologies.

The mission of the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group is to show how to use Semantic Web technology to answer cross-disciplinary questions in life science that have, until now, been prohibitively difficult to research. Today the HCLS Interest Group published two Working Drafts. The first describes the construction and use of the knowledge base that was used as part of a demonstration of life sciences data integration at the the 2007 World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Canada. The second document explains the process of integrating data with an existing Semantic Web knowledge base.

The success of the group continues to draw industry interest. W3C Members are currently reviewing a draft charter that would enable the renewed HCLS Interest Group to develop and support use cases that have clear scientific, business and/or technical value, using Semantic Web technologies in three areas: life science, translational medicine, and health care. W3C invites all W3C Members to review the draft charter (which is public during the review), and encourage those who are interested in using the Semantic Web to solve knowledge representation and integration on a large scale to join the Interest Group.

The W3C SWEO Interest Group came to the end of it's charter at the end of March with a flurry of activity. Very recently completed items include the publication of the paper Cool URIs for the Semantic Web by Leo Sauermann and Richard Cyganiak, and a Semantic Web Business Case paper and presentation by Jeff Pollock.

Although it is the end of this SWEO, many of the resources that were created will continue to be developed. These include both the knowee and Linking Open Data Community Projects, the Information Gathering task, and the FAQ document. In addition, the collection of Semantic Web case studies will continue to be developed, so please go to the Web site to see how you can submit one today!

Other notable achievements include the creation of the Semantic Web logo by Benji Nowack in collaboration with W3C’s Communications Team, and the creation of a Semantic Web flyer by Dunja Ewinger and Paula-Lavinia Patranjan.

It’s been fun working with such a great group of people in SWEO, and it’s been wonderful to see the increase in use of Semantic Web technologies since the group begun. To facilitate continuing communication about education and outreach, the SWEO mailing list has been converted into a public mailing list, and the #sweo IRC channel will be maintained.

W3C organized a workshop on Video on the Web in December 2007 in order to share current experiences and examine the technologies (see report). Online video content and demand is increasing rapidly, becoming omnipresent on the Web and the trend will continue for at least a few years. These rapid changes are posing challenges to the underlying technologies and standards that support the platform-independent creation, authoring, encoding/decoding, and description of video. To ensure the success of video as a “first class citizen” of the Web, the community needs to build a solid architectural foundation that enables people to create, navigate, search, and distribute video, and to manage digital rights.

The general scope of the proposed Video on the Web activity is to provide cohesion in the video related activities of W3C, as well helping other W3C Groups in their effort to provide video functionalities. In addition, this activity will focus at implementing the next steps from the W3C workshop on Video on the Web. The proposal is to create 3 new Working Groups around Video on the Web. Please, have a look at the following documents:

1. Activity proposal
2. Media Fragments Working Group Charter
3. Media Best Practices and Guidelines Working Group Charter
4. Media Annotations Working Group Charter

We welcome general feedback, general expressions of interest (or lack of!) and comments on the discussion list public-video-comments@w3.org.

Philippe Le Hégaret will be presenting the activity proposal during the Web Conference this week, on Thursday afternoon.

W3C’s Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Delivery Context Ontology. The Delivery Context Ontology provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The delivery context is an important source of information that can be used to adapt materials to make them useable on a wide range of different devices with different capabilities. The delivery context includes the characteristics of the device, the software used to access the service and the network providing the connection among others. This document describes the ontology (using OWL) and gives details of each property that it contains.

On a day that will go down in RIF history as spring cleaning day, the RIF WG passed 14 resolution while the American group members finished up their tax returns.

Among the 14 resolutions were decisions to publish new public working drafts of the RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD), and RIF RDF & OWL Compatibility (RDF+OWL), and the first workding draft of the RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (FLD).

The new FLD and BLD drafts incorporate significant refactoring of the previous BLD draft. FLD introduces a more general view of logic-based rule languages in a framework that can easily be instantiated for other RIF dialects, and BLD presents itself both as a stand-alone rules interchange dialect as well as an instantiation of FLD.

The RDF+OWL draft focuses on combining RDF graphs with BLD, and now incorporates a view of RIF-OWL compatibility developed with input from the OWL WG, as well as updates to reflect minor changes to BLD.

W3C Team has published new versions of the RDF N3 and the RDF Turtle serialization formats, co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly for the former, and David Beckett and Tim Berners-Lee for the latter. The new versions also eliminate some minor incompatibilities between these languages and the SPARQL pattern language.

The authors have also submitted the text/n3 and text/turtle media types to IETF.

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. SKOS provides a standard, low-cost means to describe the semantic relationships between existing knowledge systems and to port those systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a lightweight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems.