Ever since returning from the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference last week I’ve been bursting to discuss a panel that took place there on the topic “Does the Semantic Web need Ontologies?”. But the WWW2010 deadline was today and we had 3 papers to write. With that deadline now 10 minutes past, I can [...]
Right now the world’s premiere semantic web conference is happening in Washington, D.C. As a graduate student of the fellow who’s chairing the conference this year, and working down the hall from Sir Linked Data himself, I’ve had my fair share of semantic web experiences. But my background is not in Semantic Web technology, so [...]
One of the most exciting aspects of the (in-progress) HTML5 specification is the number of data-centric features it contains. It’s almost as if the committee is saying a big, “OK, OK! We heard you!” to all the data-heads out there and is providing not one, not two, not three, but four different ways to [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]
Natasha Noy gave a talk at CSAIL with the above title. She works in with a large medical bioinformatics group at Stanford. The bioinformatics community in general couldn’t care less about cool computer science but is one of the few groups that have heavily adopted formal ontologies as a way to get their work done. [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]
Mark Carman presented on the paper in the title. They’re interested in studying personalization, but for that they need personalized relevance judgements. Query logs are a great source of that information but aren’t available due to privacy concerns. So they started looking at whether tag data (public) could be used as a substitute for query [...]
Microformats and RDFa provide a way to interweave semantic markup within a web document so that structured information can be more easily extracted. Both Microformats and RDFa follow the hierarchical model of HTML: structured data to be extracted may exist spread across several layers of the DOM
hierarchy. A pseudocode example of this is below, where we see that [...]
A CIDR presentation by Ken Smith from Mitre on the use of the “match” operation that pairs properties of two different schema. It’s used to merge data from two different sources. He’s arguing that there are tons of uses of schema matching that precede the actually merging of data.
When you are trying to decide whether [...]