Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist
TS-5555

This session presents the basics of practical semantic web deployment using standards-based tools on the Java platform. It covers the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as the fundamental mashup language of the web; SPARQL, the query language for RDF; and RDFS and OWL, which provide simple inferencing capabilities.

In the distributed world of the web, information is moving from a hypertext paradigm to a hyperdata paradigm--the web today is not just a web of documents but also a web of data. But that data is available on the web and in the enterprise in a wide variety of forms: HTML, XML, RSS, spreadsheets, databases, and so on. RDF provides a uniform way to identify information in a distributed setting to form a web of data.

The session demonstrates a Java technology-based platform (built on Eclipse) that uses RDF as an interlingua for merging information from multiple web sources. Java technology plays a key role in the success of the system in several ways. First, it uses the large variety of public domain semantic web software available on the Java platform as the basis of interoperability at the API level. Second, it uses the Eclipse framework as a visual editing environment for the ontologies. Finally, it uses the modularity of the Eclipse plug-in environment to enable a sort of plug-and-play architecture among semantic components.

One of the basic ideas of the semantic web is that semantic models, or "ontologies," can be used to describe how data fits together. In the context of the web of hyperdata, an ontology can describe how data in one source relates to data from another, or even which sources of data should be merged to answer a particular question or support a particular application. The idea is that, armed with these tools, a working ontologist can describe hyperdata applications without resorting to a general-purpose programming language.

TopQuadrant has used these standards to construct a workbench for building semantic applications. Semantic mashups can be built by use of RDFS and OWL. TopQuadrant has also developed a visual flow editor for describing how distributed data can be merged in novel ways; it calls this editor SPARQLMotion, because it extends the standard query language SPARQL with intuitive information flow diagrams modeled in OWL. SPARQLMotion modules can be connected with a simple point-and-click interface to create novel arrangements.

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