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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!
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"
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.
ALT tags are for the most part used for screen readers. Unnecessary images, used just to enhance the look of the page are often given alt="" values so that the screen reader will skip the image entirely (ie: read nothing instead of saying "image foo.jpg is here with no alt tag").
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)
RDF/XML uses XML namespaces as a somewhat convenient way to write URIs (which are normally quite long).
RDF (in the abstract) doesn't use namespaces, it just uses URIs (aka URLs). (The concept of namespaces is still there in effect, as a collection of related names, in an ontology -- but that's quite different from the formalism of XML Namespaces.)
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.
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.
There's no need to "hide" the schema. Having a Word XML schema simply means you can validate whether or not something looks like a proper XML Word document. Having the schema DOES NOT mean you can actually do anything meaningful with the Word document. You can write 100% completely valid XML with Base64-encoded mysterious data in between some tags and no one will know what to do with it, schema or no schema. When will you guys learn, Microsoft doesn't need to "patent" an XML file format because having a "human readable" file format doesn't necessarily mean you can do anything with the file in the first place!
In other words, Microsoft can easily, and without patents, stick a proprietary file format in an "open format" XML document. Don't assume that they're always going to do some evil shit just because they're Microsoft. In the case of XML, they don't have to! Obfuscation is allowed by the standard!
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.)
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.