Krzysztof Janowicz (the person behind (Semantic) Similarity-Blog) is working on Sim-DL – Semantic Similarity Measurement Theory for the Description Logic ALCNR. In my eyes the notion of similarity is a good thing for search on the Semantic Web:

Currently, there is a lot of work going on in the development of query languages for the Semantic Web, see SPARQL for example. With these query languages you specify a query and an interpreter will return you those parts of an RDF graph exactly matching your query. This is a different search paradigm that we are used from search engines like Google. There, you enter a query and you will get results similar to that query, with the documents ranked highest that are most similar to it. Ranking by relevance is something not possible in SPARQL, as every results returned is equally relevant.

Markus pointed me to a nice connotation for semantic applications that found on technology created for the Semantic Web: ?Semantic as in the Semantic Web?. While we are still missing its origin (a paper?) it fits pretty well the following note on Semantic Search Engines.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is interviewed on the success of Amazon. He states very nicely that they are using services at Amazon to make this large web application scale.

My personal QOTD on this interview comes from Ian Davis:

Yeah, I like all that. But I want it bigger and I want anyone to be able to do it

DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994:

This kinda reminds me of …

the Semantic Web …

as it is now.

And if you are using FOAF check out my profile under: http://scheir.net/foaf-pscheir.rdf (watch the video and know what I mean )

[Via glück auf!]

GRDDL has advanced to being a Proposed Recommendation. GRDDL is a (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) provides a mechanism to specify that an XML document contains data that can be mapped to RDF. In addition the implementation for transforming the initial XML data RDF-XML can be specified. Thus GRDDL provides an easy way to generate RDF from, say, microformats.

Since July 6, 2007 Protégé3.3 is out (and not beta anymore). Besides bug fixes and other improvements two very nice features were added: Collaborative Protégé and the DataMaster plug-in.

• Collaborative Protégé: a new extension of the existing Protégé system that supports collaborative ontology editing. In addition to the common ontology editing operations, users can annotate both ontology components and ontology changes. There is support for searching and filtering of user annotations based on a variety of different criteria. Two types of voting mechanisms have been implemented to allow users to vote on change proposals. Collaborative Protégé can be used with the Protégé-OWL editor, the Protégé-Frames editor, and client-server Protégé. Please note that Collaborative Protégé is still considered a prototype that is under active development. Your feedback is most welcome! An installation guide, a user’s guide, an online demo, and more documentation are available on a separate Web page.
• DataMaster: a new plug-in that allows users to import schema structure and data from relational databases into Protégé. DataMaster is documented on the Protégé Wiki.

Check out the release notes.

The SPARQL Query Language for RDF is back to the status of Candidate Recommendation. Some of you may know it already had this status on April 6, 2006. It was returned to being a Working Draft on October 4, 2006.

Swoogle - a search engine for semantic web documents (a.k.a. ontologies) - is now available in an improved 2007 version:

The biggest change is that Swoogle?s IR index is now updated incrementally, as new or modified Semantic Web documents are processed. When Swoogle processes an RDF document, it analyzes it to extract metadata, and then adds or updates the metadata in Swoogle?s database as well as (re-) indexes information about the document in Swoogle?s IR engine. Previously, these information in the database was updated as documents were found but the IR index was regenerated periodically in an off line batch process. Consequently, the two were not completely synchronized. They are now, at least on a daily basis.

Recently I discovered a nice survey on semantic web search engines. If you are interested in this topic (as I am) you should not miss it:

A Categorization Scheme for Semantic Web Search Engines (Esmaili & Abolhassani, 2006)

In addition check at the references on the Search on the Semantic Web page (of course there is some overlap - search on the semantic web is a young discipline ).

In my research on search in the Semantic Web, (semantic) similarity plays a crucial role. Today I discovered a great resource for semantic similarity: (Semantic) Similarity-Blog by Krzysztof Janowicz.