visualvm VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities. Designed for both production and development time use, it further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE platform.
2010-02-11
Linking Folksonomies and Ontologies for Supporting Knowledge Sharing: a State of the Art Social tagging systems have recently become very popular as a means to classify large sets of resources shared among on-line communities over the social Web. However, the folksonomies resulting from the use of these systems revealed limitations: tags are ambiguous and their spelling may vary, and folksonomies are difficult to exploit in order to retrieve or exchange information. This report compares the recent attempts to overcome these limitations and to support the use of folksonomies with formal languages and ontologies from the Semantic Web.
Projet ISICIL : Intégration Sémantique de l'Information par des Communautés d'Intelligence en Ligne
2009-11-03
A Mathematician’s Lament I don’t see how it’s doing society any
good to have its members walking around with vague memories of
algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of
hating them. It might do some good, though, to show them
something beautiful and give them an opportunity to enjoy being
creative, flexible, open-minded
You don’t need to make math interesting— it’s already more
interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives.
Mathematics is the music of reason.
We learn things because
they interest us now, not because they might be useful later.
How many students taking literature classes will one day be writers?
That is not why we teach literature, nor why students take it. We
teach to enlighten everyone, not to train only the future professionals.
In any case, the most valuable skill for a scientist or engineer is being
able to think creatively and independently. The last thing anyone
needs is to be trained.
2009-06-22
Guerilla science: what can we do in 10 days? I recently invited participants in the upcoming e-Biosphere conference
(June 1-3, London) to join me in a collective demonstration of the
semantic web in action.
The short story is that we'll be integrating wildlife observations with
background biodiversity data to enable as many interesting queries (e.g.,
"show species out of range") as we can.
The concept we're trying to illustrate: a global human sensor net
2009-05-25
from __future__ import * » Remote JSON - JSONP The browser security model dictates that XMLHttpRequest, frames, etc. must have the same domain in order to communicate. That's not a terrible idea, for security reasons, but it sure does make distributed web development suck. There are traditionally three solutions to solving this problem. Local proxy, Flash, Script tag... I'm proposing a new technology agnostic standard methodology for the script tag method for cross-domain data fetching: JSON with Padding, or simply JSONP.
2009-05-20
SKOS implementation: Rameau subjects as linked data Announce: release an *experimental* service [1] that provides the RAMEAU subject headings as open linked data.
Rameau [2] is the main subject vocabulary used at the French national library (BnF) and many other French institutions. This site, a result of the TELplus project, and a collaboration between the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and BnF, aims at encouraging experimentation with Rameau on the web of da
2009-04-28
Html Validator :: Modules pour Firefox HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The extension can validate the HTML sent by the server or the HTML in the memory (after Ajax execution) ...
2009-04-28
SPARCool SPARCool offers a way to run SPARQL queries about any URI that follows the Linked Data principles by calling a simple URL based on the http://sparcool.net/format/predicate[;l=lang]/URI pattern.
2009-04-21
tagliatelle delicious RDFizer Takes all your bookmarks from del.icio.us, converts to RDF (using Tag Ontology), pushes into a Talis Platform store
2009-04-11
ISWC 2008: The Scalable Knowledge Systems Workshop 1. mapping relational to RDF, where possible, is faster than triple storage; and
2. the equivalent relational solution can be some 10x faster than the pure triples representation.
2009-02-16
Semantic data extractor - QA @ W3C This tool, geared by an XSLT stylesheet, tries to extract some information from a HTML semantic rich document. It only uses information available through a good usage of the semantics defined in HTML. Detects GRRDL and RDFa.
2009-02-13
SemanticDesktop.org - Wiki.IDELIANCE Lessons for the future of Semantic Desktops learnt from 10 years of experience with the IDELIANCE Semantic Networks Manager
2009-01-28
Symmetric matrices related to the Mertens function In this paper we explore a family of congruences over N* from which a sequence of symmetric matrices related to the Mertens function is built. From the results of numerical experiments we formulate a conjecture, about the growth of the quadratic norm of these matrices, which implies the Riemann hypothesis. This suggests that matrix analysis methods may play a more important role in this classical and difficult problem.
2009-01-20
A Farm Boy Reflects Very often, one goose would bravely step away from the panicked flock and walk tremulously toward me. It would be the mate of the one I had caught, male or female, and it would step right up to me, protesting pitifully. It would be frightened out of its wits, but still determined to stand with and comfort its lover.
2009-01-16
ISWC 2008: Some Questions - Inference: Is it always forward chaining? Once the working set is no longer in memory, response times jump disproportionately. Also, if the data changes or is retracted or is unreliable, one can end up doing a lot of extra work with materialization. Consider the effect of one malicious sameAs statement. This can lead to a lot of effects that are hard to retract. On the other hand, if running in memory with static data..., the queries run some 20% faster if entailment subclasses and sub-properties are materialized rather than done at run time.
2009-01-03
Palais du Zarmakoye de Dosso - UNESCO World Heritage Centre Le palais du Chef de province de Dosso a été construit en 1904, peu de temps après l'accession du Zarmakoye Abdou Aoûta au trône. Le règne des Zarrmakoye a débuté au XVème siècle, lorsque Boukar fils de Tagur Gana s'installa dans le Zigui.
2008-12-11
Mediterranean Ceramics: RDFa at Ilion The Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (GRPBIlion) database exports its content as Linked Data using RDFa
2008-12-08
IBM plans 'brain-like' computers IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.
2008-11-24
Kurzweil: "Technology is a double-edged sword" Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist on the Turing Test, human vs machine intelligence, why being funny is clever, and the dangers of advanced technologies...
2008-11-21
paggr -Smart Data Portals paggr is an interactive application that simplifies the organization
and integration of distributed web information. In a few simple steps, users can
create personalized, "smart data" portals from a variety of sources and formats
such as RDF, remote SPARQL endpoints, microformats, RSS, Atom, RDFa, or
selected APIs. Data items in paggr can be linked to each other using an intuitive
drag&drop mechanism. Additionally, paggr offers a developer zone where
everyone can collaborate on reusable data widgets via simple web forms and a
SPARQL-based scripting language with templating mechanism.
2008-11-03
semantic weltbild 2.0: why I love Patrick Sticklers URIQA approach (2004) Ever tried to convert data into RDF? Extract something from iCalendar or an MP3 file and then use a bit of RDF? Have it all in a graph? Then you may be interestedhow to choose your weapons wise: If you want a fast and easy way for RDF integration, follow Patrick Stickler and his URIQA ideas.
2008-10-29
Manifesto for Apes and nature [mAn] Tropical forests are disappearing at an excessive speed and with them the last populations of great apes. All specialists are unanimous: if we do nothing gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos will have disappeared by the middle of the 21st century. The situation of orangoutans is even more dramatic; in 20 years time, they might only exist in zoos. Today, it is important to become active in order to stop this Ecocide! We, citizens of the Earth, ask our governments and international authorities to accept as their superior duty to save and protect primates.
2008-10-22
FAQ/CharacterEncoding - Tomcat Wiki The fact is: there is no char encoding in a GET request. So an unmodified installation of Tomcat will parse the URI in a GET as ISO-8859-1 ("the Servlet spec requires it"). But a SPARQL request, for instance, requires it to be UTF-8 encoded. So it can't work!!!
Tomcat people insist that their behavior is a feature. Maybe it's not a bug, but I doubt it is a feature. To get tomcat working otherwise, you have to set a parameter in the server.xml (connector, URIEncoding) What if you don't control the tomcat install? Maybe the best thing to do is to parse the parameters from request.getQueryString(). In my web apps until now, I double UTF-8 encode the params in a GET (for instance, the semanlink bookmarklet)
2008-10-12
Faviki - Social bookmarking tool using smart semantic Wikipedia (DBpedia) tags Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It lets you bookmark web pages using Wikipedia's terms. In Faviki, everybody uses the same names for tags from the world's largest collection of knowledge!
2008-09-29
"Getting Real" with RDF and SPARQL "Getting Real" is an agile approach to web application development. This article explains how it can be successfully combined with the flexibility of semantic web technologies.
2008-09-25
Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life | Wired Science from Wired.com Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.
2008-09-10
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms When we encounter a FORM element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form...Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. That means that if a search form is forbidden in robots.txt, we won't crawl any of the URLs that a form would generate.
2008-09-02
Virtuoso Jena Provider The Virtuoso Jena RDF Data Provider is a fully operational Native Graph Model Storage Provider for the Jena Framework, enables Semantic Web applications written using the Jena RDF Frameworks to query the Virtuoso RDF Quad store directly.
2008-08-28
Job Mart - ESW Wiki This page is for listing Semantic Web-related positions available (in academia, industry, government or whatever) as well as individuals looking for work
2008-08-18
DERI Pipes Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML.
2008-08-18
Une suite de matrices symétriques en rapport avec la fonction de Mertens In this paper we explore a class of equivalence relations over N* from which is constructed a sequence of symetric matrices related to the Mertens function. From numerical experimentations we suggest a conjecture, about the growth of the quadratic norm of these matrices, which implies the Riemann hypothesis. This suggests that matrix analysis methods may play a more important part in this classical and difficult problem.
2008-08-17
Relational Database Integration with RDF/OWL Using the W3C OWL ontology standard lets you get more out of all kinds of data. Find out how this standard and some free software lets you query two databases as if they were one.
The primary goal of this article is to put together a demonstration of how you can use OWL to integrate two relational databases, and then perform queries against the aggregate collection to answer realistic questions that you could not answer without the addition of an OWL ontology.
2008-08-01
Semantic Search Arrives at the Web There are two approaches toward semantic search and both have received attention in the past months. The first approach builds on the automatic analysis of text using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The second approach uses semantic web technologies, which aims to make the web more easily searchable by allowing publishers to expose their (meta)data.
2008-07-19
alphaWorks : Scalable Highly Expressive Reasoner : Overview Scalable Highly Expressive Reasoner (SHER) is a breakthrough technology that provides ontology analytics over highly expressive ontologies (OWL-DL without nominals). SHER does not do any inferencing on load; hence it deals better with quickly changing data (the downside is, of course, that reasoning is performed at query time). The tool can reason on approximately seven million triples in seconds, and it scales to data sets with 60 million triples, responding to queries in minutes. It has been used to semantically index 300 million triples from medical literature. SHER tolerates logical inconsistencies in the data, and it can quickly point you to these inconsistencies in the data and help you clean up inconsistencies before issuing semantic queries. The tool explains (or justifies) why a particular result set is an answer to the query; this explanation is useful for validation by domain experts.
2008-07-19
ARQ: a question about property functions when handling a describe query with ARQ, is it possible to add statements to the returned RDF, based on a "magic property"? (Yes, it is)
2008-07-14
danbri’s foaf stories » Referata, a Semantic Media Wiki hosting site referata.com: a hosting site for SMW-based semantic wikis. This is not the first site to offer hosting of wikis using Semantic MediaWiki (that’s Wikia, as of a few months ago), but it is the first to also offer the usage of Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Calendar, Semantic Google Maps and some of the other related extensions you’ve probably heard about; Widgets, Header Tabs, etc. As such, I consider it the first site that lets people create true collaborative databases, where many people can work together on a set of well-structured data.
2008-07-04
NASA - Solar Probe Plus - Nasa plans to visit the sun At closest approach, Solar Probe+ will be 7 million km or 9 solar radii from the sun. There, the spacecraft's carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures greater than 1400o C and survive blasts of radiation at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Naturally, the probe is solar powered.
The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind.
2008-06-12
A Prototype Knowledge Base for the Life Sciences The prototype we describe is a biomedical knowledge base, constructed for a demonstration at Banff WWW2007 , that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies such as the W3C standard Web Ontology Language [OWL] and Resource Description Framework [RDF]. This report outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using the W3C Recommended RDF query language SPARQL [SPARQL], and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains.
2008-06-12
Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey Looking at the facts, Mika and the Yahoo! search team realized that they could not count on enhancing search by leveraging metadata on today's web - it simply does not exist to the extent needed. At the same time, it was clear that enhancing search results and cross linking them to other pieces of information on the web is compelling and potentially disruptive. Yahoo! realized that in order to make this work, they need to incentivize and enable publishers to control search result presentation. And thus, SearchMonkey was born.
2008-06-04
Case Study: KDE 4.0 Semantic Desktop Search and Tagging Semantic Web technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL) are used as a backend metadata architecture in KDE 4.0 to tag, comment, annotate, etc, all files under Linux regardless of their file format, and to initiate corresponding search actions.
2008-06-04
ESWC2008 Conference Data This page provides an overview about different access mechanisms to the RDF dataset about the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2008) and explains how the dataset can be used within different Semantic Web applications.
2008-05-29
Oracle Sees Semantic Tech Solving Business Problems There are three sort of megatrends going on in the data center right now. One is SOA in particular for applications, that enables you to essentially break apart monolithic applications and combine them as services.
But the second big trend then is to decouple the data from the application or the application services, so that in that sense what you can do is write your application or create services independent of the data sources they have to deal with, which comes full circle back to having a virtual layer between application services and data.
2008-05-20
Oregon Paleo Lands Institute We’ll take you and your family on a customized day hike to collect fossils, touch a 44-million-year-old tree, visit a lakeshore 33 million years old, or volunteer to assist paleontologists in their research.
2008-05-18
Managing URI Synonymity to Enable Consistent Reference on the Semantic Web This paper sets out an architecture for managing URI equivalences on the Web of Data by using Consistent Reference Services.
The underlying philosophy of the CRS is to treat URIs as first-class entities and separate the
equivalences of a URI into a separate knowledge base that will be aware of both intra-
repository and inter-repository synonymity. Equivalent URIs are grouped into
bundles which are themselves given their own URI. When an application wishes to
find an equivalent URI, the CRS can be queried to retrieve the corresponding bundle.
2008-05-15
SkosDesign/ConceptSemantics - W3C Semantic Web Deployment Wiki So, for a resource of type skos:Concept, any properties of that resource (such as creator, date of modification, source etc.) should be interpreted as properties of a concept, and not as properties of some 'real world thing' that that resource may be a conceptualisation of
2008-05-12
The Paleobiology Database The Paleobiology Database is an international scientific organization run by paleontological researchers from many institutions. We are bringing together taxonomic and distributional information about the entire fossil record of plants and animals. Our goal is to educate the public, summarize the literature for professionals, and foster statistical analyses of mass extinctions and other aspects of biodiversity.
2008-05-12
John Resig - Processing.js a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language and a first step towards Javascript being a rival to Flash for online graphics content
2008-05-11
RESTful Web Services: the book That's RDF for you. It's so simple I am able to explain it to people in bars within a minute. Here is an example, which says that my name is Henry: "Henry Story". Click on the URLs and you will GET their meaning. Since resources can return any number of representations, different user agents can get the representation they prefer.
2008-05-08
TagSoup home page a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild
2008-05-08
Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services | The 7th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop Please email proposals (approx. 500 words including aims, methods, main findings) by June 20th to Marianne Lykke Nielsen (mln@db.dk). Advance indication that you intend to submit a presentation would be helpful. Proposals will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and notification of acceptance will be given by July 4th. The early registration deadline for the conference and the workshop is July 31st.
2008-05-06
BoaB interactive - Web design, graphic design, multimedia, Content Management System (CMS) BoaB is exploring a collaboration with leading Semantic Web organizations and natural resource management agencies such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (Climate Change) to develop cooperative information systems — systems that make sense of distributed data; built with an open software architecture; running on the global infrastructure of the web.
2008-05-04
Apex Data & Knowledge Management Lab Apex Data & Knowledge Management Lab focuses on the research and development in the data and knowledge management area. Current interests include Next Generation Search and Retrieval, Ontology Theory and Engineering, and Semantic Web.
2008-04-23
COMM: Core Ontology on Multimedia Semantic descriptions of non-textual media available on the web can be used to facilitate retrieval and presentation of media assets and documents containing them. While technologies for multimedia semantic descriptions already exist, there is as yet no formal description of a high quality multimedia ontology that is compatible with existing (semantic) web technologies. We propose COMM - A Core Ontology for Multimedia based on both the MPEG-7 standard and the DOLCE foundational ontology.
2008-04-23
Structured Objects in OWL: Representation and Reasoning. In Proc. of the 17th Int. World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2008), Beijing Very good presentation at WWW 2008. Nominated for the best paper award
Abstract: Applications of semantic technologies often require the representation of and reasoning with structured objects—that is, objects composed of parts connected in complex ways. Although OWL is a general and powerful language, its class descriptions and axioms cannot be used to describe arbitrarily connected structures. An OWL representation of structured objects can thus be underconstrained, which reduces the inferences that can be drawn and causes performance problems in reasoning. To address these problems, we extend OWL with description graphs, which allow for the description of structured objects in a simple and precise way. To represent conditional aspects of the domain, we also allow for SWRL-like rules over description graphs. Based on an observation about the nature of structured objects, we ensure decidability of our formalism. We also present a hypertableau-based decision procedure, which we implemented in the HermiT reasoner. To evaluate its performance, we have extracted description graphs from the GALEN and FMA ontologies, classified them successfully, and even detected a modeling error in GALEN.
2008-04-23
France 5 : Les maternelles - Ecologie (Les Petits Débrouillards) Grâce à ces filets à nuages (il y en a une centaine, hauts de 4 mètres et long de 12 mètres) tendus le long d'une crête, à 800 mètres d'altitude, l'eau des brumes persistantes est retenue dans les mailles, sous forme de gouttelettes qui ruissellent le long de gouttières, s'écoulent dans une tuyauterie jusqu'à une citerne installée dans le village. Résultat, grâce à ce système, 15 000 litres peuvent être récupérés chaque jour.
2008-04-08
Cassini-Huygens: Enceladus: A Perspective on Life on Enceladus: A World of Possibilities In recent years, life forms have been found on Earth that thrive in places where the sun doesn't shine and oxygen is not present because no photosynthesis takes place...
There are three such ecosystems found on Earth that would conceivably be a basis for life on Enceladus. Two are based on methanogens, which belong to an ancient group related to bacteria, called the archaea -- the rugged survivalists of bacteria that thrive in harsh environments without oxygen. Deep volcanic rocks along the Columbia River and in Idaho Falls host two of these ecosystems, which pull their energy from the chemical interaction of different rocks. The third ecosystem is powered by the energy produced in the radioactive decay in rocks, and was found deep below the surface in a mine in South Africa.
2008-04-07
RDF and social networks - bobdc.blog Defining a vocabulary instead of a DTD is the low-hanging fruit... It doesn't reduce the work to do by simplifying it, but by reducing the scope: by forgetting about the data structures.
2008-04-07
An Entity Name System for Linking Semantic Web Data The Semantic Web should provide a global space for the seamless integration of small knowledge bases (or local “semantic webs”)
into a global, open, decentralized and scalable knowledge
space.
In this paper, we will try to defend the view that the practical realization of the grand vision of the Semantic Web as
a huge graph of interlinked data would be much easier and
faster if we could count on a service which, by analogy with
the DNS, we call an Entity Name System (ENS), namely a
service which stores and makes available for reuse URIs for
any type of entity in a fully decentralized and open knowledge publication space.
2008-04-05
triplify: expose semantics Triplify provides a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications. Triplify is a small plugin for Web applications, which reveals the semantic structures encoded in relational databases by making database content available as RDF, JSON or Linked Data. Triplify is very light weight
2008-03-18
WR 104: The prototype Pinwheel Nebula A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.
2008-03-06
Ivan Herman - Semantic Web Adoption Invited talk given at the First China Semantic Web Symposium (CSWS 2007), in Beijing, China, on November 19, 2007.
2008-03-04
XML.com: XSLT, Browsers, and JavaScript The W3C Recommendation "Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents" describes a processing instruction to include at the beginning of a document to name a stylesheet to apply to that document.
2008-02-23
SparqlPress - SPARQL-ing days SparqlPress explores the addition of an RDF store to the Wordpress weblogging system through PHP-based extensions, providing a basic Personal Semantic Web Aggregator that can integrate interesting data from nearby in the Web, exposing it to local and remote applications via the SPARQL query language and protocol. The primary goal is to populate the local store with an interesting subset of the nearby Semantic Web, through discovery and crawling of RDF data from the websites (typically blogs; initially Wordpress blogs running the FOAF/SKOS plugin).
2008-02-17
Lost Boy: Bee Node Deconstructed "ADC pattern" (ASK, DESCRIBE, CONSTRUCT): a way to probe a remote data set to see if it has information that is of interest and then extract information from that data set with increasing levels of precision and control.
2008-02-01
Grawiki - A Wiki (and aggregator) for graph-shaped data - benjamin nowack's blog Grawiki is a SPARQL-based Data Wiki, a little bit inspired by freebase, less impressive, feature-rich, scalable and all that, but, well, OpenSource, SemWeb-enabled, and decentralized (each Grawiki installation can import selected graphs from other ones, back-POSTing is in the works). As it seems that I forgot to write-protect the instance mentioned above, you can play with it if you like. You'll most probably encounter bugs, the built-in inferencer is still at alpha stage, and editing of consolidated bnodes is quite tricky to implement. I'll tweak things in a day or two. With Grawiki, I think I finally have (the start of) a tool that could work nicely for ad-hoc RDF editing and aggregation (it can import RDF and certain microformats). Oh, and a personal URI, and a FOAF file. At last ;-)
2008-01-25
RDF Net API A simple network interface to remote RDF models. There are two sets of functionality: a basic access mechanism that provides query capability to a collection of RDF statements, and an update mechanism where, subject to security constraints (not discussed here), changes to the RDF model can be made.
2008-01-09
Alternative to 303 response: Description-ID: header From: Tim Berners-Lee I did wonder about the following: in the case when the URI is not of
document, when currently we use 303,
then the server can return a document *about* it with an extra
header to explain to the browser
that it is actually giving you a description of it not the content of
it.
2008-01-03
Another RDF Syntax! (URI-embedded RDF) Let a URI constructed like this: URIbase/ars?s=encodedURIs&p=encodedURIp&o=encodedURIo identify the statement: URIs URIp URIo
2007-12-31
BBC - Science & Nature - The Lost City of Nasca On a barren desert in South America is one of the greatest archaeological wonders of the world. Etched in the surface of the pampa are hundreds of straight lines, geometric shapes and the images of animals and birds. These are the Nasca lines, built by the Nasca people, but why they were created has defied explanation. Now archaeologists have begun to uncover the lost world of the line builders.
2007-12-27
BBC - Science & Nature - Cahuachi: The Lost City of Nasca Cahuachi is now revealed to have been abandoned after a series of natural disasters destroyed the city. But before they left it, the Nasca people covered the city in the arid pampa sand where, until recently, it has remained a barely visible mound in the desert.
2007-12-27
Javascript RDF Parser in ie Modifications made to code of tabulator-0.8-2007-02-01T16-43Z to have the javascript RDF Parser working with internet explorer 6 and 7. This is not a complete port of Tabulator: it only concerns the RDF parser (and the way to invoke Ajax). It has not been fully tested (only with simple RDF, without lists, anonymous resources, etc.)
2007-12-17
Alistair Miles » SKOS and RDFa in e-Learning Both SKOS and RDFa have interesting consequences for e-learning technology, and especially for leveraging the Web as a platform for delivering learning.
2007-11-20
Definition of "URI References" in RDF (Concepts and Abstract Syntax) Because of the risk of confusion between RDF URI references that would be equivalent if derefenced, the use of %-escaped characters in RDF URI references is strongly discouraged.
J'ai l'impression d'être à l'ouest dans semanlink
2007-11-17
Falcons Falcons is a keyword-based search engine for Semantic Web entities. It enables searching concepts guided by recommended vocabularies, searching objects guided by recommended concepts, and browsing entity summarization via concept spaces.
2007-11-09
Twine A revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find information. Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together.
2007-11-08
The RDFa Test Harness (Crazy Ivan) The RDFa Test Harness provides an interactive mechanism to check the conformance of an RDFa extractor and SPARQL query engine.
2007-11-07
Le Prix Nobel Albert Fert plaide pour une recherche libre Auriez-vous décroché le Nobel avec le financement de la recherche sur projet que met en place le gouvernement ? Non, s'il n'y avait eu qu'un financement sur projet. Je n'ai pas démarré mes travaux en me disant que j'allais augmenter la capacité de stockage des disques durs. Le paysage final n'est jamais visible du point de départ.
2007-10-25
Rapport du Comité consultatif national d'éthique sur l'amendement ADN Le CCNE attire l'attention sur la dimension profondément symbolique dans la société de toute mesure qui demande à la vérité biologique d'être l'ultime arbitre dans des questions qui touchent à l'identité sociale et culturelle. Elle conduirait furtivement à généraliser de telles identifications génétiques, qui pourraient se révéler à terme attentatoires aux libertés individuelles. Elle risquerait d'inscrire dans l'univers culturel et social la banalisation de l'identification génétique avec ses risques afférents de discrimination. Le CCNE redoute les modalités concrètes d'application dans des réalités culturelles très différentes des nôtres. Nos concitoyens comprendraient peut-être mieux l'exacte réalité de tels enjeux s'ils étaient confrontés à des exigences analogues lors de leur propre demande de visa.
2007-10-04
Reforestation en Pays dogon Technique de plantation : Effectuer la plantation deuxième quinzaine de juillet afin que les arbres puissent survivre sans ou presque sans arrosage ultérieur. Il faut toutefois être très présent les premières semaines pour éviter l’assèchement au moment du repiquage. La croissance de l’arbre sera par ailleurs très influencée par les soins ultérieurs reçus par l’arbre (désherbage, paillage, arrosage, engrais). Faire un trou de 60 cm x 60 cm et 50 cm de profondeur. Mettre au fond la terre qui était au dessus et rajouter si possible du fumier. Couper la partie inférieure du pot inciser la partie latérale du pot. Insérer le pot dans le trou sans retirer le plastique. Mettre un peu de terre puis retirer le plastique. Mettre encore de la terre puis tasser fermement. Pour améliorer le taux de survie, on peut planter une dizaine de tiges de mil séchées autour du plant, ou une gaine IRRIGASC. On peut également couper un partie des feuilles pour limiter l’évapotranspiration et ne garder que la partie supérieure. Dans le même objectif, recouvrir le sol d’herbes ou de tiges de mil a pied de l’arbre (paillage). Une famille peut au maximum s’occuper de 100 arbres, étant donné qu’elle doit dans le même temps être dans les champs de mil. Si les arbres sont espacés de 10 m, la superficie forestière est donc de 100m x 100 m = 1 Hectare pour 100 arbres.
2007-09-20
YouTube - Kokeïna - Moussa Poussi I made this song for the abandoned children. It is about all the children of the world. Cette chanson, je l'ai composée pour les enfants abandonnés, et elle parle de tous les enfants du monde. Recorded live in Niamey, August 19, 2007.
YouTube - Sibo - Moussa Poussi That "sibo" is not the fish of the river. Sibo. Even when it lies, you'll say it tells the truth. It walks on my head, it walks in my flesh until my eyes cry. Sibo, it caresses me till the morning. Recorded live in Niamey, August 19, 2007.
YouTube - Samba Diko - Moussa Poussi This song is dedicated to Mami Wata, mother of the river and water.
Cette chanson est dédiée à Mami Wata, mère du Fleuve et de l'eau.
Recorded live in Niamey, August 19, 2007.
Squeak Squeak is a modern, open source full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative leverages Squeak to power the Etoys application shipped with every laptop around the world. (Etoys is a powerful script-based environment to learn science and math by encouraging exploration and experimentation.)
2007-09-10
Les couilles de l'éléphant Comédie gabonaise
"Ce n'est pas parce que l'éléphant est maigre que ses couilles ne remplissent pas une calebasse."
Une très bonne rengaine accompagne le film : "My Son", de Wasis Diop
2007-08-24
SCOT:Let’s Share Tags! » About SCOT The SCOT(Social Semantic Cloud Of Tags) ontology is to semantically represent the structure and semantics of a collection of tags and to represent social networks among users based on the tags.
2007-08-24
RDFa in the wild This page tries to gather RDFa implementations, systems that use (or contemplate on using) RDFa, and RDFa-based vocabularies and the like.
2007-08-23
Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web This document gives an overview on the state-of-the-art of multimedia metadata formats. Initially, practical relevant vocabularies for developers of Semantic Web applications are listed according to their modality scope. In the second part of this document, the focus is set on the integration of the multimedia vocabularies into the Semantic Web, that is to say, formal representations of the vocabularies are discussed.
2007-08-01
RFI - Niger : retour à la terre - Reportage Afrique «Avec la récupération de terres pour le travail agricole, des plateaux dénudés autour de Niamey ont changé de visage en peu de temps. »Au Niger, une grande campagne de remise en culture de terres dégradées par l'érosion contribue à freiner l'exode rural dans la région de Niamey.
2007-07-26
RFI - L'oignon : une filière prometteuse pour les paysans nigériens Avec une production annuelle de plus de 300 000 tonnes, le Niger est l'un des pays d'Afrique de l'Ouest qui exporte le plus d'oignons vers le Burkina, le Togo, le Ghana, et la Côte d'Ivoire. Si elle est bien structurée, la filière est prometteuse pour les paysans nigériens. Là-bas, l'oignon est d'ailleurs communément appelé «l'or violet».
2007-07-26
Dans les mines d’or de Komabangou, au Niger Dans ces mines d’or situées à 270km au nord de Niamey, les conditions de vie des milliers d’orpailleurs venus de toute la sous-région sont extrêmement précaires et dangereuses. La promiscuité, l’insalubrité et les risques liés à l’activité minière sont à l’origine d’une situation sanitaire complètement détériorée.
2007-07-26
CO-ODE The CO-ODE project aims to build authoring tools and infrastructure that make ontology engineering easier. We specifically support the development and use of OWL-DL ontologies, by being heavily involved in the creation of infrastructure and plugins for the Protégé platform and more recently, OWL1.1 support for the OWL API.
2007-07-26
A use for embedded semantics? eRDF Link Preview Demo RDF-in-HTML offers interesting possibilities for end-user experience. This page demonstrates one of those possibilities. Here, some javascript pre-fetches eRDF data related to the uri being linked to.
2007-07-03
SDB - Jena wiki a new database subsystem for Jena. It uses a conventional relational
database, rewriting SPARQL to SQL. The relational database tools for
load balancing, security, clustering, backup and administration can all
be used to manage the installation. Currently it works with Oracle, MS
SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Derby and HSQLDB databases.
2007-07-02
Pubby – A Linked Data Frontend for SPARQL Endpoints Much Semantic Web data lives inside triple stores and can be accessed only by sending SPARQL queries to a SPARQL endpoint. Pubby can be used to add a Linked Data interface to those SPARQL endpoints.
2007-06-23
D2RQ - Treating Non-RDF Databases as Virtual RDF Graphs - Chris Bizer As Semantic Web technologies are getting mature, there is a growing need for RDF applications to access the content of non-RDF, legacy databases without having to replicate the whole database into RDF. D2RQ is a declarative language to describe mappings between relational database schemata and OWL/RDFS ontologies. The mappings allow RDF applications to access the content of huge, non-RDF databases using Semantic Web query languages like SPARQL.
2007-06-23
sindice Sindice is a simple lookup index for Semantic Web resources. Sindice indexes the Semantic Web and can tell you which sources mention a certain resource URI. Sindice does not store the RDF, does not answer queries, and does not try to be a "Semantic Web search engine". You can simply use Sindice from within your application to implement a "find more information" button.
2007-06-13
[Linking-open-data] Equivalence miner In order to map the Jamendo dataset to the Musicbrainz dataset, I developed a small equivalence miner. The main problem was that it was impossible to use literal lookup techniques for these datasets - many small bands have the same name, some are just represented in the jamendo dataset but there are some matching names in the musicbrainz dataset, etc. This equivalence miner does two things: it disambiguates and propagates equivalence relationships. Moreover, it works in a linked data style (the only input data it "needs" is a start URI).
2007-06-13
Uriqr - A URI Search Engine "URI everything, and everything is cool", right? But where do you find
the URIs if you're doing this on a small scale? We have a great
opportunity to spread the Linked Data message if we help people to make
their FOAF files Linked Data, we just need to give them the tools.
So, I created Uriqr (as in "eureka"), a simple little search engine
aimed squarely at FOAF hackers and other RDF-aware people. It looks in a
SPARQL endpoint of crawled data for any URIs rdfs:label'led or
foaf:name'd with your search term(s). The results are then looked up
against Sindice and ranked according to how many other documents
reference them. This is cool when I want to get rid of some of the
bNodes in my FOAF file, as it helps me decide which URIs to use for
other people without having to look in their FOAF file.
2007-06-13
Structured Ontology Format Rob Shearer The University of Manchester
(nice demo of an ajax script at OWLED 2007)
Abstract. This paper presents a simple data model for the representation
of OWL ontologies (including the new features of OWL 1.1). The
model is built from basic structures native to all common programming
environments, so it can be used directly as an API for ontology analysis
and manipulation. Furthermore, serialization of these structures using
the widely-supported YAML standard yields a readable text format
suitable for ontology authoring by average users with text editors and
code-management tools.
2007-06-07
dowhatimean.net » Less code: eRDF templates for RDF-driven web sites Let’s assume you have a web application driven by data from an RDF triple store. You generate HTML pages by querying the triple store and inserting the bits and pieces into an HTML template. Now if you add eRDF or RDFa annotations to the HTML template, in a way that reflects the original RDF data, then by definition the annotations completely specify what data you need to populate the page. And the template itself therefore must be sufficient to extract all the required triples from the store. No coding needed!
2007-05-31
YAGO: A Core of Semantic Knowledge Unifying WordNet and Wikipedia - Paper We present YAGO, a light-weight and extensible ontology
with high coverage and quality. YAGO builds on entities
and relations and currently contains more than 1 million
entities and 5 million facts. This includes the Is-A hierarchy
as well as non-taxonomic relations between entities (such
as hasWonPrize). The facts have been automatically extracted
from Wikipedia and unified with WordNet, using
a carefully designed combination of rule-based and heuristic
methods described in this paper. The resulting knowledge
base is a major step beyond WordNet: in quality by
adding knowledge about individuals like persons, organizations,
products, etc. with their semantic relationships – and
in quantity by increasing the number of facts by more than
an order of magnitude. Our empirical evaluation of fact correctness
shows an accuracy of about 95%. YAGO is based on
a logically clean model, which is decidable, extensible, and
compatible with RDFS. Finally, we show how YAGO can be
further extended by state-of-the-art information extraction
techniques.
2007-05-23
NOVA | Portrait of Australia's unique evolutionary history. Why did Australia get a preponderance of pouched and egg-laying mammals? And, at the same time, precious few of the kind of mammal that dominates every other land in the world? Today no monotremes exist outside of Australia (and New Guinea), and no placental mammals that didn't fly or swim there—for example, bats or dugongs—exist in Australia except for rodents (which arrived only about five million years ago) and mammals that were introduced by people (who arrived by 60,000 years ago).
2007-05-23
BBC NEWS | Antarctic 'treasure trove' found An extraordinarily diverse array of marine life (more than 700 new species) has been discovered in the deep, dark waters around Antarctica.
2007-05-20
XTech 2007: without the X - the return of {{Textual}} markup This paper discusses textual formats as a trend using a case study of the Turtle RDF Syntax developed by the author and using developing a new JSON textual format for RDF as an example of the tradeoffs that need to be considered.
2007-05-18
Biodiversity Heritage Library Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. This literature will be available through a global “biodiversity commons.”
2007-05-11
[LDH-Toulon] la colonne infernale de Voulet-Chanoine Pourquoi cette violence extrême du colonisateur ?
Les idées racialistes ont forcément joué. Un théoricien disait : il faut expulser [de la métropole] la violence des classes "dangereuses" et lui permettre de se débrider ailleurs. Là-bas, l’individu, livré à lui-même, transgresse tous les interdits. C’est le thème d’ Au coeur des ténèbres de Conrad (1899). En Europe, au XXe siècle, on osera transgresser parce qu’on l’a déjà fait en Afrique.
2007-04-30
Ping the Semantic Web.com Share your RDF Data with the World!
PingtheSemanticWeb.com is a repository for RDF documents. You can notify this service that you created/updated a RDF document on your web site.
2007-04-20
Data Integration on Semantic Web Example related to book searching and selling on how the Semantic Web technologies can be used for data integration
2007-04-17
RDF Book Mashup Serving RDF descriptions of your books. The RDF book mashup demonstrates how Web 2.0 data sources like Amazon, Google or Yahoo can be integrated into the Semantic Web.
2007-04-14
Giant crystals enjoyed perfection With lengths over 11m, the giant gypsum crystals found in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales are a great natural wonder.
2007-04-05
dbpedia.org - Using Wikipedia as a Web Database dbpedia.org is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. dbpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.
2007-04-04
Using those profiles As an individual, if I could capture the information that's flowing through my del.icio.us plus Flickr, Bloglines, Google Calendar, Amazon Wishlist even... plus LinkedIn etc - together with my own blog, personal notetaking/wiki/code repository, todo lists, plans etc, and integrate all this in a triplestore, and front it with some kind of Planet/Longwell hybrid (with a little bit of access control), it would be a hugely useful personal knowledge management system.
2007-04-03
[Linking-open-data] Forms in the web of data Beside "href" links, forms are an important feature of the hypertext web. How
does this transpose to the web of data? Shouldn't there be a standardized way to
"include forms" in RDF data?
2007-03-20
RDF and SOA The purpose of this paper is not to propose a particular standardization effort for refining the existing XML-based, WS* approach to Web services, but to suggest another way of thinking about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in terms of RDF message exchange, even when custom XML formats are used for message serialization.
Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing, W3C
2007-03-12
Horst, Herman J. ter: Completeness, decidability and complexity of entailment for RDF Schema and a semantic extension involving the OWL vocabulary We prove that entailment for RDFS (RDF Schema) is decidable, NP-complete, and in P if the target graph does not contain blank nodes.We show that the standard set of entailment rules for RDFS is incomplete and that this can be corrected by allowing blank nodes in predicate position. We define semantic extensions of RDFS that involve datatypes and a subset of the OWL vocabulary that includes the property-related vocabulary (e.g. Functional- Property), the comparisons (e.g. sameAs and differentFrom) and the value restrictions (e.g. allValuesFrom). These semantic extensions are in line with the 'if-semantics' of RDFS and weaker than the 'iff-semantics' of D-entailment and OWL (DL or Full). For these semantic extensions we present entailment rules, prove completeness results, prove that consistency is in P and that, just as for RDFS, entailment is NP-complete, and in P if the target graph does not contain blank nodes. There are no restrictions on use to obtain decidability: classes can be used as instances.
2007-02-06
A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers Rather unnoticed from the main software engineering camps, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has designed some very interesting technology in the context of its Semantic Web vision. This technology has been originally designed with the goal of making web pages easier to understand for intelligent agents and web services. Interestingly, however, it turns out that Semantic Web languages and tools could also play a major role in software development in general.
2007-02-06
Linking-open-data - Wiki The goal of the Linking Open Data project is to make various open data
sources available on the Web as RDF and to set RDF links between data items
from different data sources.
2007-03-01
TagSoup SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: poor, nasty and brutish. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. Free and Open Source software, licensed under the Academic Free License
2007-01-24
Disco Hyperdata Browser Simple browser for navigating the Semantic Web as an unbound set of data sources. The browser renders all information, that it can find on the Semantic Web about a specific resource, as an HTML page. This resource description contains hyperlinks that allow you to navigate between resources. While you move from resource to resource, the browser dynamically retrieves information by dereferencing HTTP URIs and by following rdfs:seeAlso links.
2007-01-15
tagtriples from Phil Dawes 'tagtriples' - a experimental format for exchanging and aggregating structured metadata. It's based on RDF ideas, but emphasises simplicity over precision. 2005-03-23
2007-01-09
Semantic Web Client Library The Semantic Web Client Library represents the complete Semantic Web as a single RDF graph. The library enables applications to query this global graph using SPARQL- and find(SPO) queries. To answer queries, the library dynamically retrieves information from the Semantic Web by dereferencing HTTP URIs and by following rdfs:seeAlso links.
2007-01-02
[httpRange-14] Resolved from Roy T. Fielding on 2005-06-19 (www-tag@w3.org from June 2005) we provide advice to the community that they may mint "http" URIs for any resource provided that they follow this simple rule for the sake of removing ambiguity: a) If an "http" resource responds to a GET request with a 2xx response, then the resource identified by that URI is an information resource; b) If an "http" resource responds to a GET request with a 303 (See Other) response, then the resource identified by that URI could be any resource; c) If an "http" resource responds to a GET request with a 4xx (error) response, then the nature of the resource is unknown.
2007-01-02
What do HTTP URIs Identify? - Design Issues "This was a result of my being in a minority with this opinion on the Technical Architecture Group, and yet finding it the only one I could accept. This is related to TAG issue HTTPRange-14." (TBL)
2007-01-02
Preferences...
Greenpeace: zéro déforestation d'ici 2020
