Scripting for the Semantic Web

This year´s ESWC hosted the 3rd International Workshop on “Scripting for the Semantic Web” (SFSW 2007). I really enjoyed that event, also because of the very friendly and relaxed atmosphere in that community. Danny Ayers started with a talk called “Two Webs!“. He pointed out the ways to use the “Semantic Web” (again: it´s NOT a completely new web aside Web 2.0!) as an “RDF-Bus” where existing data sources can be interlinked quite easily (see: LinkingOpenData @ SWEO).

• Michael Hausenblas presented “PSIMeter” which is a demo to show alternative ways to RDF-ize the flickr API regarding machine tags.
• Chris Bizer outlined once more the importance of the “Web of (open) data” and presented The RDF Book Mashup: From Web APIs to a Web of Data (For a demo go here)
• Eyal Oren was talking about two services which play an important role in a Semantic Web infrastructure: Sindice and Ping the Semantic Web
• Uldis Bojãrs and some others from the SIOC project presented their ideas and I really liked the SIOC Browser.
• And finally the brilliant Ripple won the Semantic Scripting Challenge (Paper).

I also enjoyed talking with Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Danny Ayers, Tom Heath and some others very much. Thanks to the organizers!

Sparqling 5 years of semantic web evolution

The Semantic Web School has monitored press releases about semantic technologies and related stuff over the past 5 years. A collection of about 1.200 links and summaries on articles are the result. These articles were tagged and those tags are mainly linked to wikipedia – so this might be an interesting data collection for some web applications…

Inspired by the work of of LinkingOpenData (W3C SWEO) and dbpedia we´re happy to announce that now there is a Sparql endpoint for that data which is open for the public.  Ideas for some mashups are:

• Showing on a timeline which topics came and went
• Publishing a list of press releases linked with wikipedia articles
• Extracting names of companies which are mentioned in the articles and calculating a tag cloud for them

Any other ideas?