Scientific American December 2007 "The Semantic Web In Action"
Authors
Lee Geigenbaum
Ivan Herman
Tonya Hongsermeier
Eric Neumann
Susie Stephens
Standards (and emerging standards)
RDF
Resource Description Format
OWL
Web Ontology Language
SPARQL
An RDF query language
SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language
Interesting Tools
(Note: not all of these mentioned in the article)
Virtuoso Universal Server
Allegro Graph
"Capable of processing billions of RDF triples, AllegroGraph is a modern, high-performance, persistent, disk-based RDF graph database with support for SPARQL, RDFS++, and Prolog reasoning from Java applications."
free for < 50 million tuples
Jena
"Jena is a Java framework for building Semantic Web applications. It provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine."
Protege
"Protégé is a free, open-source platform that provides a growing user community with a suite of tools to construct domain models and knowledge-based applications with ontologies."
(Note: a large portion of semantic web tools seem to be Java based)
Interesting Projects and Applications
DBPedia
"DBpedia 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."
Drug Discovery
Cincinnati Children's Hospital searches for genetic causes of cardiovascular diseases, translated a variety of data sources into RDF, uses Jena and Protegy to analyze "hundresd of genese that might be involved with cardiac funciton by applying a ranking algorithm"
Eli Lily, "Sematntic tools ar ea llowing them to compile numerous incompatibly biological descriptions into one unifed file"
Healthcare
SAPPHIRE: U.of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, detect, analyze and respond to emerging public health problems.., constant feed of data from 30% of Houston area ER visits, "a key feature is an ontology that claassifeis unexplained illnesses that present flulike symptoms", relieved nine nurses from manual work
Agfa Healthcare Clinical Decision Support System, "When a person inputs a change into one part of a system, reconrds that should be altered in other parts of the system or in the systems of another institution are automatically updated"
"' we are investigating Semantic Web technologies because traditional approaches for data integration, knowledge management and decision support will not scale to what is needed for personalized medicine,' says John Glaser, chief information officer oat Partners HealthCare System in Boston."
FOAF
more reading
books on semantic web
Wikipedia
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee et al. defining article
Architectural and philosophical points, What RDF Is Not, "The goal of the semantic web is to express real life. Many things in real life, real questions which we will face are not efficiently computable. There are two solutions to this: The classical (pre-web) solution is to constrain the language of expression so that all queries terminate in finite time. The weblike solution is to allow the expression of facts and rules in an overall language which is sufficiently flexible and powerful to express real life. Create subsets of the web in which specific constraints give you specific computational properties."
Giant Global Graph
