OpenCalais Meetup

Meetup Description

Tom Tague will be presenting Calais 4.0 - and its connection to the Linked Data cloud - to reporters, editors, Semantic Web aficionados, and developers alike in Washington DC on March 5, 2009. The DC Area Online News Association Meetup will also be joining us at this event.

Specifically, Tom will address the 'Linked Content Economy,' an evolving ecosystem of enriched and connected content that puts semantic metadata and open data assets to work in everyday media, content applications and Web-based services of all kinds.

Parking is available under the building, and the location is walking distance from McPherson Square and Metro Center stations.

Refreshments will be served.

Calais: Connect. Everything.

We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

What Calais does sounds simple – what you do with it could be simply amazing.

The Core: The Calais Web Service

The Calais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well.

Take a look at the Document Viewer for a small demonstration of what Calais can do.

This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to… whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about.

The Tools: A Growing Ecosystem of Calais-Enabled Capabilities

The Calais Web Service is a powerful capability - but using it to deliver value to real people requires applications and the tools to build them. Major focus areas of the Calais initiative are delivering the tools with which to build great applications and fostering the community of developers that will make those applications happen.

To learn more about the growing set of Calais tools please take a moment to visit the Gallery and Tools sections of the site.

The "Open" in Calais

The web service is free for commercial and non-commercial use. We’ve sized the initial release to handle millions of requests per day and will scale it as necessary to support our users.

SPARQL for the Pragmatic Ontologist

SPARQL

• SQL of RDF


• XSLT of RDF


• JavaDoc of RDF


• Lint of RDF


• Unit Test of RDF

SPARQL is READ-ONLY!

Jena ARQ Extensions (SPARQL 2 Candidates)

1st Query: Find the country names
SELECT ?country ?name
WHERE {
?country rdf:type country:Country .
?country country:name ?name
}

OR

SELECT ?country ?name
WHERE {
?country a country:Country .
?country country:name ?name
}

OR

SELECT ?country ?name {
?country rdf:type country:Country ;
country:name ?name
}

OR

SELECT ?country ?name {
?country country:name ?name
}

2nd Query: Find the states and their cities sorted by ascending state, then city name, then by descending city name
SELECT ?state ?city
WHERE {
?cityR city:name ?city ;
Uscity:state ?stateR .
?stateR state:name ?state
} ORDER BY ASC(?state) DESC(?city)

Compactified Expression
SELECT ?state ?city
WHERE {
?cityR city:name ?city;
uscity:state [state:name ?state]
} ORDER BY ASC(?state) DESC(?city)

SELECT ?state ?capital ?airport
WHERE {
?stateR state:name ?state ;
state:capital ?capitalR .
?capitalR city:name ?capital
OPTIONAL {
?airportR airports:city ?capital ;
airports:airport ?airport
}
}

3rd Query: Select with UNION
SELECT ?state
WHERE {
{
?stateR state:borderstate usstate:AL, usstate:TN .
?stateR state:name ?state .
}
UNION
{
?stateR state:borderstate usstate:ID .
?stateR state:name ?state .
}
}

4th Query: Find all states that do NOT border another state

SELECT ?state
WHERE {
?stateR state:name ?state .
OPTIONAL {
?stateR state:borderstate ?borderState .
}
FILTER(!bound(?borderState))
}

FILTER means "keep".
With !bound() we effectively look for the absense of a resource.

5th Query: Find all states, and cities, where the city name begins with the letter 'Y'

SELECT ?state ?city
WHERE {
?cityR uscity:state ?stateR
?cityR city:name ?city .
?stateR state:name ?state
FILTER(regex(xsd:string(?city), "^Y"))
}

Cast untyped literals into datatype needed by function.

Filter early, near the top of an expression
-if a condition is not met the pattern match aborts immediately.

User OPTIONAL sparingly, they will slow down a query, sometimes drastically.

Use ASK when you do need the results of the match.

DISTINCT and ORDERED BY may also be slow over large result sets.

USE LIMIT and OFFSET with large result sets.

6th Query: DISTINCT avoids duplicate result sets

SELECT DISTINCT ?state ?city
WHERE {
?person uscity:address ?address .
?address uscity:city ?city .
?city uscity:state ?state
}

7th Query: CONSTRUCT Query
CONSTRUCT allows us to specify a graph to return.
CONSTRUCTed graphs are not inserted into the queried graph - but some tools allow the constructed graph to be asserted.

CONSTRUCT {
?countryR owl:sameAs ?nationR
}
WHERE {

}

Start comments anywhere with "#".
Use LET() to assign variables.

Use INSERT before DELETE to move data.
The graph can also be a variable.

TopBraid Suite Advanced Product Training
SPARQLMotion
SPIN - SPARQL Inferencing Notation (SPROC)

Geospatial Semantics Meetup

What
Geospatial Semantics

When
Thursday, January 15, 2009 7:00 PM

Who
At least 45 Semantic Web Supporters.
This Meetup is full.

Where
SHRM Conference Room
1800 Duke Street
Alexandria VA 22314

Meetup Description
In this month's meeting, we discuss Geospatial Semantics. Mashups using Google Maps and other APIs have suddenly become very popular. However, this is only the beginning. As more linked data becomes available on the web, a whole new generation of applications become possible. In this meeting, we will discuss related technologies and current work that is being done in Geospatial Semantics.

Our speaker will be Dr. Yaser Bishr. Yaser is the co-founder and CTO of Image Matters LLC. Dr. Bishr has extensive experience in geospatial semantics, semantic web, and social web. In 1997, he published the first book on geospatial semantics, his Ph.D. topic, and wrote the geospatial semantic entry in the Encyclopedia of GIS. He is the visionary and architect of Image Matters' gnizr Enterprise semantic technology. Yaser is a serial entrepreneur. Prior to founding Image Matters, he founded Millennia GmbH, a German software consulting firm with clients in Europe, the US, SE Asia and the Middle East. Prior to Millennia Yaser was assistant professor at the University of Muenster, Germany. Currently Yaser is on a mission to develop a profitable business model for gnizr Enterprise. Yaser has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from ITC and the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands.

Image Matters LLC is a software technology and professional services company that produces software products, develops advanced technology solutions, and provides consulting services to government and commercial clients. Image Matters specializes in Geospatial Web, Semantic Web (Web 3.0), Web 2.0, Sensor Web, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Web services, and Location-Based Services (LBS).

The meeting location and light refreshments are provided courtesy of TopQuadrant.

The Semantic Web is Next

Source: TechCrunch.com

Must-Learned Semantic Tools

One of my interests is in Semantic Web. The following tools are great if you already know .NET, C#, RSS and RDF, and want to do more with Semantic Web.

Semantic Web/RDF Library for C#/.NET

SemWeb is my Semantic Web/RDF library written in C# for Mono or Microsoft's .NET 1.1/2.0. The library can be used for reading and writing RDF (XML, N3), keeping RDF in persistent storage (memory, MySQL, etc.), querying persistent storage via simple graph matching and SPARQL, and making SPARQL queries to remote endpoints. Limited RDFS and general-purpose inferencing is also possible. SemWeb's API is straight-forward and flexible.

ASP.NET RSS Toolkit

RssDataSource control to consume feeds in ASP.NET applications:

• Works with ASP.NET data bound controls


• Implements schema to generate columns at design time


• Supports auto-generation of columns at runtime (via ICustomTypeDescriptor implementation)

Caching of downloaded feeds both in-memory and on-disk (persisted across process restarts)
Generation of strongly typed classes for feeds (including strongly typed channel, items, image, handler) based on a feed URL (the toolkit recognizes RSS, Atom and RDF feeds) or a file containing a sample feed. Allows programmatically download (and creation) of feeds using strongly-typed classes.

LinqToRdf

LinqToRdf provides a full-featured LINQ query provider for .NET using both local triple stores with Graph Matching and SPARQL queries on remote stores. It also provides graphical design tools for visual studio 2008 that provide a UML style design surface for the production of both ontologies and .NET domain models.

What is the Semantic Web?

Semantic Web is global mesh of information that is easily processed by machines. It is an efficient way to represent data on the World Wide Web. This sytem was thought up by Tim Bernes-Lee, who was the inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. It is constantly worked on by a team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). Also many languages, publications and tools have already been developed based on this sytem.

The Semantic Web allows people to publish and find information faster and easier. It is built on syntaxes which us URIs, Uniform Resource Identifier, to represent data, usually in triples based structures. A language which uses URIs is called RDF, Resource Description Framework. RDF XML is considered to be the standard interchange format for RDF on the Semantic Web. Semantic Web languages are very powerful in that they make it very easy for people to create and publish information using URIs and that it is very unconstraining in what it lets people say and do. But at the same time, they are the basis for very well defined and structured applications.

The next step in the architecture of the Semantic Web is trust and proof. Applications on the Semantic Web will depend on context generally to let people know whether or not to trust the data. These applications will generally contain proof checking mechanisms and digital signatures. The Semantic Web is growing and it is important that we address these issues before they get out of control.

Source: The Semantic Web: An Introduction [http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/]