The Semantic Web

The state of play for liberal arts

campuses

December 2009

NITLE Research(http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/archives/046534.html )

Today’s hour

Agenda1.sketch of

semantic field2.spectrum of

uses (campus + world)

3.discussion of uses

What you can take away

• general awareness of emerging tech

• pointer to interesting projects

• ideas for projects you can do

• network with each other

What is the Semantic Web?A set of technologies• full stack includes:

– RDF– OWL– SPARQL– RDFa

• …and also NLP

http://obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-web/semantic-web-architecture.html

What is the Semantic Web?Policies, practices, strategies• interoperability (“The Semantic Web is a

web of data”, W3C)• openness• linked data"data integration is the name of the game"

- Sir Tim Berners-Lee, 2008,http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=105

What is the Semantic Web?businesses

growing• Sites• Tools• Consulting

What is the Semantic Web?A set of technologies?Web content with:• Identifiers• Exposed metadata

(triples)• Links“By May 2009 this had

grown to 4.2 billion RDF triples, interlinked by around 142 million RDF links.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

What is the Semantic Web?

W3C, Alice in Semantic Wonderlandhttp://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/alice-example.html

RDFa example•Properties assigned

How can this be used?

1. External resources, under the hood2. Semantic tools and services3. Plug-ins and add-ons4. Campus projects5. Pedagogies and research

External resources,under the hood

http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0830-Nanjing-IH/ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_data.php

External resources, under the hoodMore:• Tripit,

http://www.tripit.com/

• Dapper MashupAds, http://www.dapper.net/

• Snapshots, http://snap.com • BooRah, http://boorah.com

Semantic tools and services"Semantic Knowledge Databases“, like

TwineExample: Faviki: semantic social

bookmarking

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_what_is_the_killer_app.php

Semantic tools and services

• Presentation and visualization

(http://www.sioc.me/)

(http://www.sioc.me/)

Plug-ins and add-onsDerive categories, drive suggestions

Tagaroo for WordPress, http://tagaroo.opencalais.com/

Plug-ins and add-ons

Others:• Zemanta,

http://www.zemanta.com/

• Semantic Mediawiki, http://www.semanticmediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Semantic tool in play: ClearForest Gnosis, FF

plugin

Public museum projects (Powerhouse, Australia) http://tinyurl.com/yq66ss

Campus projects

Enterprise or medium-scale architecture strategies

• repository (example: http://dspace.nitle.org/)

• general campus-housed documentation• revise metadata strategy and/or run

local app• Rely on growing number of helper

apps (i.e., Triplify, GRDDL, etc.)

Campus projectsWhy do such a thing? 1. Campus research and connections2. Outreach3. Open content - connect with some

academic projects, like OAI4. "make your information more

programmable" (Reuters, Tim O’Reilly interview, February 2008, http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/reuters-ceo-sees-semantic-web.html)

Campus projects

Example: Vitro (Cornell, http://vivo.cornell.edu)

-across departments, admin. units

Campus projectsOntology editor available:

http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/ Needed: Java, Apache Tomcat and

Ant, MySQL, Subversion Howto: create an ontology, then

populate https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/VITROUSERS/Home

Campus projectsNIH funds

Vitro-powered multi-campus science collaboration

http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/the_american_recovery_and_reinvestment_act/20091102.asp

Pedagogies and research

How: use preceding toolsWhy?• information literacy: better, smarter

search• information aggregation, or "knowledge

construction" (Jason Ohler)• collaborative work, finding and

facilitation• computer science class projects

Pedagogies and researchCS: create

semantic tools

• Example: Welkin, from MIT’s SIMILE

• http://simile.mit.edu/welkin/

Limitations

• too geeky, not visible• perceived expense• no killer app• complexity and scale of overall

semantic enterprise• ecological growth means natural

selection

What to do with it?

Your turn.• • • • • •

• • • • • • • •

What next?What do you see?• • • • • •

• More tools• More RDF-readable

data exposed • New functions• RDFa->HTML5?• Applying SKOS

(Simple Knowledge Organization System) to references

•

Some resources

ENSEMBLEhttp://www.ensemble.ac.uk/

Horizon Reporthttp://www.nmc.org/horizon

W3C Semantic Web resourcehttp://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Some resources

Peter Mika, “Semantic Search Arrives at the Web” (2008)

http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/38595/0/page/1

Jason Ohler, The Semantic Web in Education

EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2008

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/

TheSemanticWebinEducation/47675

SemTech list of applicationshttp://semtech-

survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk/technology

Liberal Education Today bloghttp://blog.nitle.org/let

http://blogs.nitle.org/let/?s=semantic

NITLE

http://nitle.org