nodalpoint.org - Jim Hendler - Comments

RDFs

cariaso — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:45:40 -0400

I came across this old thread, and thought I'd point out that these days SNPedia does have the sacred RDFs thanks to the semantic-mediawiki.org extension. Today the most obvious benefit is that the SNPedia:FAQ is able to maintain some live counts about the site. The RDFs aren't yet connected to any others, but one baby step at a time it looks a bit more semantic. It seems only a matter of time until it can leverage SPARQL and perhaps the Halo browser.

Cladistics

nuin — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:09:16 -0500

That's already a cult. A couple of more years it will be a completely new religion.

Religious War or Religious Cult?

Duncan — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:56:30 -0500

Theres lots of good stuff in the Open Lab 2007 winning entries but I particularly liked this: Academia is a [religious] cult. Sometimes the semantic web seems more like a religious cult than a scientific endeavour :)

Call for (more) Semantic Web Testimonials

Duncan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:15:20 -0500

In addition to rather old and tired looking semantic web testimonials, Lee Feigenbaum is asking for more, see forwarded message below.

So if you've a SPARQL in your eye, these people would like to hear from you.

======

Dear W3C Colleagues,

I'm writing to you as a representative of an organization that is a W3C member whom I believe to be involved in research and/or development surrounding Semantic Web technologies. (My apologies if I'm mistaken.) In particular, I'm writing in reference to the SPARQL query language and protocol, which has recently been published as a W3C Proposed Recommendation, and is scheduled to be published as a W3C Recommendation in January.

In anticipation of sharing this achievement with the public, we are looking to gather a substantive collection of testimonials in support of SPARQL. I'm including below a note from Janet Daly of the W3C Communications Team which includes more details and guidelines about testimonials.

This is a great opportunity to help with outreach for a key semantic web technology to the rest of the world. At the same time, testimonials are an excellent vehicle for advertising your organization's support of W3C Semantic Web technologies as well as any products that your company might have that implement or use SPARQL.

The deadline for testimonials is Jan 8, 2008.

For more detailed information on the testimonial process, including examples, guidelines, and much more, please see Janet Daly's note below.

thanks,
Lee Feigenbaum
On behalf of the RDF Data Access Working Group

PS If you think you might provide a testimonial, I'd appreciate a heads-up note, just to help me track our status. Thanks!

~~ more information from Janet:

Dear DAWG participants,

Please accept my late congratulations for the set of SPARQL Proposed Recommendations.

In anticipation of a successful completion of the review period, W3C is preparing for announcements around SPARQL Recommendations, or standard. As part of the celebration, we will be issuing a press release and would like to include a testimonial sheet from W3C Member implementors and others.

We will have a draft press release available in the next week for your review. The document will be available to those with Member access. It will not be made public until the actual announcement date. Our current plans are to issue an announcement in early January; we're making efforts to get this draft to you well in advance of the date in deference to the scheduling difficulties of the end of the calendar year.

The guidelines for testimonials are at the bottom of this email. Deadlines for sending those documents to w3t-pr@w3.org is currently 7 January 2008.

Again congratulations on work well done. We look forward to having your participation in the Recommendation announcement.

Kind regards,

Janet Daly, W3C Communications Team

Guidelines for Testimonials

Supporting Testimonial Statements along W3C Press Releases

The Communications Team invites the Membership to participate in a press announcement by submitting supporting testimonial statements. Testimonials are not translated by W3C, but submission of testimonials in multiple languages is encouraged.

Please note that the press release itself is expected to be multilingual (at least available in English, French and Japanese).

Testimonial Guidelines

A testimonial must

contain a statement of support for the W3C and the technology we are promoting in this release;
be grammatically correct;
be attributed to an individual in the submitter's organization (name, title, org)

A testimonial should

contain an explanation of why the news is important to the Web or to specific communities, extolling the virtues and features not before enjoyed;
include a commitment for support of the spec in existing or future products and/or services

A testimonial may

include product announcements which support the technology now or plans to support later;
be in a language other than English.

A testimonial must not

contain criticisms of the technology that may undermine the success of the specification;
contain links to sites outside of W3C;
criticize other products or services;
exceed 100 words.

(note to self, this doesn't sound very "scientific"?)

Upon request by journalists, we would also pass on contact information of companies who have contributed testimonials.

Questions and Follow-up

If your marketing team has any questions, please have them phone Janet Daly (voice: +1 617.253.5884) or send mail to w3t-pr@w3.org.

shmontology

cariaso — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 14:15:11 -0500

big upfront design is suicide.

DBpedia has written rdfs for the existing wikipedia templates. I should have no problem creating rdfs for the snpedia ones. For the moment I'm keeping flexibility by writing all my queries in python. In time I'll carve the stable 80% into an rdf, and be able to use sparql.

From this web page you can play with wikipedia semantic queries.
http://wikipedia.aksw.org/index.php?qid=13

Mike Cariaso * Bioinformatics Software * http://www.cariaso.com

Dude, Where's Your Ontology?

Duncan — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:56:54 -0500

Hello Mike, had a look at SNPedia and the semantic wiki. Couldn't find the (sacred?) ontology (RDF / OWL / Whatever) anywhere, is it publicly available? Maybe I didn't look hard enough...

Anne Cregan at the University of New South Wales, Australia has kindly drawn my attention to an article in the December 2007 issue of Scientfic American "The Semantic Web In Action" which claims corporate applications of the semantic web are well under way, and consumer uses are emerging... haven't read it yet, but looks like it might be interesting.

Its written by Lee Feigenbaum (IBM), Ivan Herman (W3C), Tonya Hongsermeier , Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens .

warning believer

cariaso — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:21:28 -0500

A solution is a web with both, where some websites are more semantic than others. The semantic web lacks commercial success, because it has no place to put advertising. Best Buy has no motivation to make a semantic web site. But NCBI definitely does.

My own solution has been to ensure that data I produce is semantic friendly. The data is written onto wiki pages. The whole site becomes a semantic book about one topic. humans can edit it, but programs can crawl and query it. Humans and bots work together, on mix of wikipedia and relational database.

A public example is at
http://www.snpedia.com/index.php?title=SNPedia
which tracks human genetic variations and the tests for them

and these slides explaining a semantic wiki based LIMS
http://bioteam.net/wikilims.html

These are baby steps towards a full semantic web, but I've found them extremely powerful.

The algorithmic simplicity of ontologies solves many important problems, but fails miserably for much of the real world. Tag systems adapt better to the real world. Both can be modeled semantically, and should be.

Mike Cariaso * Bioinformatics Software * http://www.cariaso.com