2011-12-11

Linked Data Workshop @ W3C

Last week, I attended the W3C workshop on Linked Enterprise Data Patterns. I gave a talk, together with my colleague Ryan McDonough (follow these links: position paper, presentation slides).

The workshop was very interesting, revealing a couple of things of particular interest (to me):

  • I am not the only one frustrated by the fact that there is a lot of confusion between URLs as queries and URIs as identities (of resources/objects). This may seem like a small thing, but actually it is a real obstacle in the adoption of Linked Data.
  • ROI of Linked Data in large organizations still unclear (as a perception).

If everything goes well, we will start some new work on clarifying what Linked Data applications will look like, and how to build them. Another small step towards my real goal, the adoption and deployment of Semantic Web technologies.

Posted by ora at 21:44 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

2011-02-22

Interview

Folks at the "Ideas Project" pulled me aside during the last Nokia World event and wanted to know if there was an idea I wanted to talk about. They videotaped this interview of me talking about data sharing between applications, and the "death of applications" (as we know them today). Those familiar with my old ideas about the Semantic Web will understand where this is coming from. Perhaps not a "new" idea per se, but certainly one we haven't seen implemented yet...

Posted by ora at 10:25

2010-02-14

Wilbur is Dead - Long Live Wilbur!

As many of you have quite correctly concluded, we are no longer actively maintaining Wilbur at Nokia. Today I have released what tentatively is the "final" Nokia release of Wilbur, available here as a gzipped tarball. The release is merely the current development snapshot that I have been using for some experimentation, but (and this may be significant to some folks) we also changed the Wilbur license to LLGPL.

The Wilbur toolkit is now at least 10 years old, and during its lifetime the project yielded one Ph.D and almost a dozen conference papers. It also served as a foundational experimentation tool and helped us develop a better understanding of the problems and solutions of RDF processing and storage. The spirit of Wilbur will continue to live on in the Piglet toolkit, released as part of the Smart-M3 system.

I will continue to answer questions about Wilbur should somebody have any...

Posted by ora at 18:59 | Comments (6)

2010-02-02

SPARQL revisited

I was happy to see that complex property paths are being considered as an addition to SPARQL as part of the new SPARQL 1.1 work. Lack of transitive closure earlier made me kind of lose interest in SPARQL for a long time, now things might change.

Continue reading "SPARQL revisited"

Posted by ora at 04:43

2009-11-02

Semantics for the Rest of Us

We had a successful workshop at ISWC 2009 last week, titled "Semantics for the Rest of Us -- Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World" (proceedings). Sandro Hawke from W3C gave the keynote talk, and we also had a panel discussion, chaired by Jim Hendler (my position statement slides are here).

Many thanks to everyone who participated (it was standing room only!). My particular thanks go to Lalana Kagal of MIT who did most of the work to get this workshop together.

Posted by ora at 11:25