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RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations
J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."
...you might be interested in a new project hosting site which was just opened - SemWebCentral. It already hosts several DAML tools, including ObjectViewer, the beginnings of an OWL plugin for Eclipse, and various others.
Semantic Web is a interesting progression. Maybe hopefully more sites will start to use better markup on their websites now. A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.
Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?
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When I first read about "the semantic web", my first thoughts were "how the hell is this useful?"
About a year later, I noticed that Clay Shirkey had written an interesting article on the Semantic Web...
It's a bit of a long read, but it does sum up the issues with it quite handily.
And the only browser to use the new recommendations
correctly is..... Phoni... Firebi... FireFox!
You mean the people who force us to put one ALT attribute for each IMG tag, but have 8 ALT="" on their own web page?
Who really cares about their recommendations?
Most blogs have RDF/RSS feeds right now. And just a few days ago there was an article right here on /. about embedding licensing information in web sites - more semantic webbery ;)
Microsoft? Didn't they use to make a browser or something?
This is where the serious fun begins.
Microsoft has already decided to use the RDF standard in it's XML based reporting solution. The interesting thing with this product is it's being touted as a open-source like product: reports are XML based, no binary required to view them, rdf would be a standard, reports are HTML-viewed, no required viewer. Which is funny that Microsoft is trying to break into the reporting market by being generic to break the hold of the current slew of companies that hold the monopoly there with more proprietary solutions.
Interesting don't ya think?
Peace Out.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
This is off-topic, but can someone explain, why RDF uses namespaces? Isn't it a bit overkill?
I've been looking for some sort of RDF review vocabulary so that I can incorporate product reviews into RSS feeds (but also store them seperately in a complete archive or something). With some sort of review aggregator/grabber, it seems like this would be simple to find out if your friends (as opposed to zealots) liked/disliked a product. The best-looking review vocabulary I've found is the Ideagraph one. Any tools that support reviews with such a format? Or any repositories for RDF reviews? Other formats?
True story.
RDF is actually quite usefull and is used when making extensions for FireFox/Mozilla among other things. Be sure to check out the RDF validator here as it can save you time.
It will be very interesting to see how RDF/XUL stands up against XAML.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
It's legal. Sometimes alternate text is inappropriate for text browsers. If I have multiple images that make up my logo, for example, it would be approriate to only give one the logo text, and set the others to "". You need the alt, but you don't need to have it equal text.
Microsoft has released two new Microsoft Standards(tm) called MSRDF and MSOWL.
Speculation that these two new standards are broken versions of w3c's recent RDF and OWL releases was further confirmed when leaked documents with "w3c" blacked out in pen, the Microsoft logo added to the top with crayon and a few numbers blocked out with white out written back in with biro, came to light.
Criticism of Microsoft's horrifically buggy and insecure browser Internet Exploder(tm) was shot down by Steve "Developers(tm)" Ballmer who said that features were much more important than security. "People want to browse the web with help from our new Browser Assistant(tm) to assist them. We think an animated cartoon image of an owl will reassure our customers."
When another reporter pointed out that OWL had little or nothing to do with ornithology, cartoon, animated or otherwise, Steve looked a little uncomfortable and declined to answer any more questions.
Shouting "Developers Developers Developers!" loudly, and squirting sweat everywhere in what can only be assumed is a defence mechanism similar to an octopus ot squid, he beat a hasty retreat into a waiting helicopter.
The helicopter is later reported to have crashed. It was rebooted and a patch applied. The patch restored flying ability, but the doors no longer work. A patch is promised for the doors tomorrow.
(-1 offtopic) (+1 recovering from car crash, cut me some slack)
A lot of RDF out there is in FOAF and RSS 1.0 vocabularies. Increasingly, people use to link RDF files, which makes it possible to have RDF crawlers ("scutters") harvest RDF from the web. I have an RDF aggregator service running that crawls the semantic web. There's a lot of useless broken RDF out there, so if you put RDF on your web site please use W3C's RDF Validator to check for valid RDF.
Everyone knows that OWL stands for "Ordinary Wizarding Level." Come on, MIT, get with the program.
It is a master plan to turn web site creation in a thing so complicated that Indians will no longer be able to catch up with the neccessary standards.
So, in 2.5 centuries, when Governamental Mandatory Internet Explorer Browser V. 7.5 do implement all of these (stolen from GPLed code, of course), all those jobs will be re-insourcered into the USA.
-><- no
When I saw RDF, the first thing I thought of was, "The world wide web is going to use the Robotech Defense Force? Wow...that's a way of enforcing standards."
Ok, back into my hovel I go,
Joe
RDF and OWL don't necessarily have anything to do with the browser. They're aimed more at new Semantic Web tools. Yes, they have uses within some browsers (I believe Mozilla uses RDF), but your argument is similar to saying that RSS won't ever catch on because IE doesn't support it.
True story.
Maybe you should look at the standards. These aren't common end-user things like XHTML or CSS, where Microsoft's reluctance to play along dooms the standards to meaninglessness. Instead, they are two esoteric standards which would be handled by a wide range of specialised XML tools, not Grandma's web browser.
Microsoft didn't have people active in either Working Group. They didn't fund this any more than any other W3C (Full) Member.
Then there's RDF-query, which is suppose to be used with RDF-rules and RDF schema. There's already a better protocol in xquery. W3C is rapidly becoming useless and isn't willing to find a compromise between solid theory and practical application.
It's been reported in other /. articles that on one hand, M$ will use an XML schema for all Word documents. However, the next licensing agreement for Office will stipulate that no one is permitted to reverse-engineer the schema for use in an open source project.
This makes me think that "security through legally -enforced obscurity" will be the order of the day in Redmond. Imagine if, say, all element names were encrypted, or were even just bloody confusing, e.g. <ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi> arial </ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi>.
This will make M$ appear open, but only appear so. C'est plus ca change...
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
If the markup is part of the content, it's not really pure content, or good markup. Markup tags should reference the content, not be embedded in it.
The separate Structure, Content and Markup layers should all be parsable without knowledge of the others.
--Mike--
Don't know if the AC will check on this later or not, but the point is that you never want a screen reader saying that. You want to have it spit out useful information (ie: Slashdot image in the upper left, "Welcome to Slashdot") or nothing at all.
If you've ever used clear gifs to space out a page just so, you've hit an area where this is important. You don't want the screen reader spitting something out for an image that the sighted can't even see. What would be the point?
In the W3C page, the 8 alt="" are all little triangle icons, that just sort of indent the text. Does a person who is blind need to hear "Triangular Icon" or "image right.gif is here with no alt tag"? I can't really think of a case for it.
Yes, they're available via http and include many web technologies but really these are about metadata and relationship information, not presentation. There's more to "The Web" then endless HTML pages, and that other space is where these are aimed at. Material using these newly set standards can be linked and searched and eventually massaged for presentation but the raw stuff isn't intended for your traditional web browser to use itself.
Y'know, thats a really interesting opinion, but it would be more so if you were to tie it to the topic at hand. Yes these are quickly evolving technologies and yes, what's out in the field doesn't always match what's in the standards process. However when you talk to the folks doing this stuff IRL most will tell you they're trailblazing out of need and are quite enthusiastic about a standard eventually happening they can use. Indeed many of them are actively involved in the standard-setting process and applying the lessons they've learned.Sometimes the W3C does seem out in left field: It's got any number of way-far-ahead things cooking, as well as any number of other passed-by ones still stumbling along. It's hard to predict when starting up a committee what will be needed when they're done, nor always how it will end up being used, or if it will all be quickly irrelevant. On the other hand they're right on target much of the time, and if occasionally laggard they're as often prescient.
But back to the immediate topic both these specs being set will be welcomed in many circles. Neither appears perfect but both seem quite good, immediately usable, and without great conflict to past practice.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The OWL sense of "ontology" is the second sense, if you read "theory" in the formal (computer science/mathematical logic) sense.
That is, an OWL ontology tells readers (especially computers) what kinds of things exist and what kinds of relationships they can have to each other.
Some of the OWL specs are actually pretty readable. Try starting with the OWL Overview. (Others, like OWL Semantics, are... more challenging.)
It's because the the Web Ontology Language Working Group disliked the acronym "WOL" and decided to call it OWL.
Also, consider the A. A. Milne character Owl, who "could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren't looking over his shoulder saying "Well?" all the time...".
The Army reading list
Personally I find it hard to work with RDF/XML since it can get kind of unreadable. I've found this primer on n3 helpful. n3 is a simpler way to write RDF, which makes the triple structure a little more obvious.
A fun place to start in RDF is making a foaf page. Foaf is the friend of a friend vocabulary. If you search for foaf in google you should find stuff to help you start with it. This lets you track things like degrees of seperation between people.
You can write OWL markup that describes the content of your webpage, but this is somewhat harder to do (there are some graphical tools that would help), and less useful right now. There aren't many tools that make use of/display random OWL markup associated with a web page.
More useful for a small webpage might be including dublin core metadata (should have no problem searching for their homepage either) about the author, title, etc. of each page. The dublin core initiative provides info about how to do this.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
An Ontology is supposed to tell you what things are (what things there are) and how those things are related.
OWL and RDF schemas are ontologies in the philosophical sense in that they define a set of entities and relations which allow you to make meaningful inferences from assertions framed in terms defined by the ontologies in question. An Ontology defines the categories and relations that make up a world.
Ontologies are not themselves information (except in the trivial sense) but rather structures which allow agents (human or machine) to make sense of information.
To use an extremely basic example, let's say you have an Ontology for all things connected to selling snacks, you would have categories for Snacks, Owners, Currency and Transactions. Each of those categories might have sub categories (Snacks:hot,Snacks:cold) and each Category will have constraints on the relationships it can have. You would also have entries for the relations that can exist (Whole-part, owns, consumes). As you can see even a very basic ontology quickly grows to be quite complex.
This connects with his mistaken point that the Semantic Web is based on some single universal ontology. This is of course the opposite of what RDF is about -- it's about allowing lots of ontologies to be used side by side.
So we don't model the real world perfectly, we model it well enough for some set of applications in some ontology. Every database designer, nearly every programmer does this all the time. We model it well enough and then the computers... do what computers do.
RDF is nothing new here. What's new is establishing a fairly wide and precise consensus around a language for communicating data about arbitrary things.