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Inference on the Semantic Web
This is a very informative slideshare on inference and the power of the Semantic Web. To emphasize the potential of the Semantic Web, Myungjin Lee used RDF and OWL constructs to represent the statements of his slides. Very impressive, though.
HTML5 and Semantics
If you ever did a web project that featured dated entries, like articles in a blog, you may have typed something like
<div id="navigation">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Link 1</li>
<li>Link 2</li>
<li>Link 3</li>
</ul>
</div>and
<span class="publication-date">2009-11-03</span>Now, this is higly understandable for any developer and for most of your users, but not for crawlers and the like. As this is the central issue in the field of the semantic web, there are already some solutions that address this problem. You could, for example, enhance your code with semantic markup like RDFa or microformats.
But then, that may be overkill. Why not just use the possibilities that come with the shiny new HTML5? Most of the modern browsers already support at least some of the new features. Features, in this case, are new text-level semantic tags that allow a lightweight semantic annotation of content. With the use of these new tags, our first example would read:
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Link 1</li>
<li>Link 2</li>
<li>Link 3</li>
</ul>
</nav>This enables screen readers, mostly used by people with limited sight, to jump directly to the sites menu and allow a quick navigation. Even more fun comes with the second example:
<time datetime="2009-11-03" pubdate>2009-11-03</time>This promotes the human readable string to a full machine readable timestamp that tells every crawler/browser/whatever the publication date of the embracing document.
If you want to learn more about these two and all the other cool new tags, please have a look at Dive into HTML5, a clearly structured and neatly designed publication by the great Mark Pilgrim.
Martian Notation for Topic Maps
Posted by semantosoph on
Nov 02, 2009
| 0 comments
Filed under gtm, ontology, semantic web, topic maps
Many people tend to understand structures much better when they are properly visualized. So it comes to no surprise that there were some proposals for a Graphical Topic Map notation (GTM) made in the past. The guys from musicDNA recently stepped into the spotlight with their latest publication that illustrates Topic Maps by using a Martian as example. Unsurprisingly, they call it Topic Map Martian Notation.
Topic Maps Lab moves
In the past days, the Topic Maps Lab has moved in different ways. First of all, we had to leave our own 9th floor offices in downtown and moved to the ground floor of the computer science department building. The new offices have a sgnificant lack of look-out but give us much shorter paths to the rest of the department. Fotos will follow, but don’t expect something spectacular.
Aside from moving geographically, we constantly move forward to TMRA 2009. With only ten days to go, the conference organization and proceedings are moving towards completion. I, for my part, finished the proceedings on last thursday and will rouse the print office on tuesday, so you all will have a freshly printed proceedings book in your conference package.
NB: If you are coming to TMRA 2009 and are in need of getting something to eat (beyond the great conference catering), I strongly recommend a visit at the newly opened Vapiano Restaurant in downtown Leipzig. They serve great italian food, freshly made before your eyes with fair prizes.
The Semantic Web Landscape 2009
Long time no post. Learning for exams keeps me busy. But while learning, I found this neat presentation that was created by Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics.
These slides were originally a tutorial presented for the SIG preceding the May 2009 meeting of the PRISM Forum. They attempt to give a survey of the technologies, tools, and state of the world with respect to the Semantic Web as of the first half of 2009. You may note the complete absence of topic maps, which clearly says, that more topic maps evangelization is needed.