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RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the standardization-baby dept.

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."

8 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. If you're interested in the Semantic Web... by U5eR · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  2. The semantic web... by schon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The semantic web... by SandHawk · · Score: 5, Informative

      Okay, I thought those were relatively pleasant reads, which can be a plus. (And I wanted to say something fast, before slashdot buried any response I might make...)

      My actual response at the time is brief and chatty. The response from Dan Brickley is also short and sweet. Neither of us felt it was worth the time to reply point-by-point.

      The "misquoting" is to suggest that my "how you buy a book on the Semantic Web" sketch should possibly cause Jeff Bezos to lose sleep. I was trying to explain an experimental protocol in a way I hoped my grandmother could understand (seriously!) and Shirky thinks I'm sketching out Amazon's doom? I don't expect the Semantic Web to doom anyone but folks who want to keep data exchange laborious.

  3. Re:W3C? by ArmenTanzarian · · Score: 5, Informative

    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").

  4. In other news... by jo_ham · · Score: 5, Funny

    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)

  5. RDF Crawlers by aharth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. OWL by bongoras · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone knows that OWL stands for "Ordinary Wizarding Level." Come on, MIT, get with the program.

  7. Re:This is good news by jilles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.

    That is because there are a lot of very complex standards with little or no toolsupport. Most of the implementations of the major w3c standards are incomplete and/or inconsistent with the specification.

    As a content provider (i.e. a website maintainer) there is no point in producing stuff that the majority of the visitors cannot display. Basically anything beyond xhtml1.0 and a subset of CSS1 & 2 w3c standards compliant documents are totally pointless if the intention is that anyone can access them.

    BTW. I agree that slashdot is long overdue in supporting standards. Sites like wired.com and espn.com show that it is possible to save bandwidth (considering that /. partially depends on donations/subscriptions they owe it to their paying readers not to waste pennies on that) and deliver content in a standards compatible way.

    --

    Jilles