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.

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.

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.

After a long series of beta releases Protégé 3.2 (final) was released on November 11!
Also a pre-release of Protégé 4.0 is available together with some screenshots of the new Protégé. Besides the good news of an all new version of Protégé, there are other great news: While we are excited about the proposed enhancements for Protégé 4, we will continue to support the Protégé 3.x series indefinitely as we have important clients and applications that depend on the 3.x implementation.

Danny Ayers posted the link to The ultimate mashup — Web services and the semantic Web, Part 1: Use and combine Web services over at IBM’s developerWorks. I am allready curious about the other 5 parts of this tutorial series: In Part 6, the fun increases. At this point, you have a working application and the framework in place so that the system can use semantic reasoning to understand the services at its disposal. In this part, you give the user control, enabling him or her to map new services into the ontology and to pick and choose the data that is used for a custom mashup.