Semantic Web Activity News

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group has released a first Working Draft of a document explaining the effective use of URIs to enable the growth of the Semantic Web. The “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web” discusses two strategies for choosing URIs for the Semantic Web, gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other alternatives are less effective. Comments on this draft are requested by 21 January, to be integrated into a final document at the end of the Group’s charter.

W3C has published a Member Submission from Inria, France, entitled "RDF/XML Source Declaration". Here is the abstract of the document:

When querying or reasoning on metadata from the semantic web, the source of this metadata can be of great importance. While the SPARQL query language provides a keyword to match patterns against named graphs, the RDF data model focuses on expressing triples. In many cases it is interesting to augment these RDF triples with the notion of a source for each triple (or set of triples), typically an IRI specifying their real or virtual origin. This document proposes an RDF/XML syntax extension providing an attribute to specify the source of triples in an RDF/XML representation.

The W3C has just launched a new Incubator Group, called “Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group”. The mission of the Emergency Group is to review and analyse the current state-of-the-art in vocabularies used in emergency management functions and to investigate the path forward via an emergency management systems information interoperability framework. Look at the charter of the Group for further details on planned work. The group conducts its work on the public mailing list public-xg-eiif@w3.org (which has a public archive as well as an RSS feed).

The RDF Data Access Working Group has published three SPARQL Proposed Recommendations: SPARQL Query Language for RDF, SPARQL Query Results XML Format, and SPARQL Protocol for RDF. The first specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs; the second specification defines an XML format for the variable binding and boolean results formats. The third specification uses WSDL 2.0 to describe an HTTP protocol for conveying SPARQL queries to an SPARQL query processing service and returning the query results to the party that made the request. Comments are welcome through 10 December.

The POWDER WG met during the week long W3C TPAC event, and, with the help of notable outside help, has undergone a significant change of direction. As a result, all currently published documents should be regarded with extreme caution! For details see the group's own blog.

The final reports of the W3C Geospatial Incubator Group has just been published: Geospatial Vocabulary and Geospatial Ontologies. The first document also includes a reference to a GeoOWL ontology that relies on other, existing vocabularies (like GeoRSS or GML). The second document gives an overview of some other, existing ontologies in the area.

The Rule Interchange Format Working Group has published the following documents: RIF Basic Logic Dialect and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility. The Basic Logic Dialect specifies a basic format that allows logic rules to be exchanged between rule-based systems. Rules interchanged using the Rule Interchange Format RIF may depend on or be used in combination with RDF data and/or RDF Schema or OWL data models. RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility specifies compatibility of RIF with the Semantic Web languages RDF and RDFS; in the future the document will address OWL as well.

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group jointly published the First Public Working Draft of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. RDFa attributes can be used with languages such as HTML and XHTML to express structured data. RDFa allows terms from multiple independently-developed vocabularies to be freely intermixed. This document has parsing rules for those creating an RDFa parser as well as guidelines for users in organizations who wish to use RDFa. For those who would like start using RDFa, the RDFa Primer is an introduction to its use and shows real-world examples.