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HTML+RDFa First Draft Published

The HTML Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of HTML+RDFa. RDFa is intended to solve the problem of machine-readable data in HTML documents. RDFa provides a set of HTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. Using RDFa, authors may turn their existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content.

RIF is a W3C Candidate Recommendation

The W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Candidate Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with Semantic Web technologies.

Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

New W3C Group to Standardize Relational Database to RDF Mapping

W3C announces the new RDB2RDF Working Group, whose mission is to standardize a language for mapping relational data and relational database schemas into RDF and OWL, tentatively called the RDB2RDF Mapping Language, R2RML. From the beginning of the deployment of the Semantic Web there has been increasing interest in mapping relational data to the Semantic Web.

Triplification Challenge 2009 Winner

I’d like to congratulate the Linking Open Drug Data task within W3C’s Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group for winning the Triplification Challenge this year. Anja Jentzsch, Jun Zhao, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Kei-Hoi Cheung, Matthias Samwald and Bo Andersson did a tremendous amount of work to interlink life sciences data relating to traditional Chinese medicine, clinical trials, genes, diseases, drugs, and adverse drug reactions.

RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax translated to Chinese

程龚 (Gong Chen) has published a Traditional Chinese translation of the RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax, under the title “資源描述框架（RDF）：概念與抽象語法”.

oeGOV: Open Government through Semantic Web Technologies

by Ralph Hodgson | Tue, 09/01/2009 – 10:10am

Enabling Data Independence for Government Transparency

by Ralph Hodgson, CTO, TopQuadrant, Inc.

Open Government has become a popular theme, both in the U.S. and other countries.  With “Transparency” gaining momentum, increasing categories and amounts of government data are becoming available on the web.  In the U.S., an impetus for this was Barrack Obama’s memorandum to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. This included the following statement:

POWDER is a W3C Recommendation

POWDER, the Protocol for Web Description Resources, is the latest Semantic Web technology to reach W3C Recommendation status. Taking a Semantic Web/linked data view, POWDER allows you to associate predicates and objects with multiple subjects, all with explicit provenance. Data is usually encoded in XML with an associated GRDDL transform that generates an OWL ontology. A Semantic Extension allows resources to be considered as instances of a class based on their URI.