SemTech 2010: My feedback & ideas

1. SemTech 2010: My feedback & ideas Stefano Anibaldi, OEKC 01/07/2010

2. The conference • At the first conference, held in 2005 , the number of participants was considerably low: 300. Last year 800. This year, more than 1400 coming from hundreds of different organizations. • .. despite the “economical crisis”! • Five full days of presentations, panels, tutorials, announcements, new company/product launches, and conversations. • ..in short, a huge list of things to hear and learn but at the same time the place for meeting people..

3. The conference • Based on the experience accrued during the last few conferences, SemTech’s secretary Tony Shaw asserts that semantics is a “gradual” technology rather than an explosive one. • Technical foundations are solid and marketplace understanding increases every year. • New proposals were presented of semantic applications in diverse domains, such as health reform and transport systems and.. governmental data!!

4. FAO: Pioneers of the semantic web • During the Conference, at least on two occasions, FAO was mentioned as a Knowledge Organization that has done great efforts to obtain optimal results in the area of publishing data. • AGROVOC was given as the model to follow of for publishing vocabularies to be interlinked (keynote of Dean Allemang, TopQuadrant) • Then the Country Profile project (Iglesias and Altobelli), and FAOSTAT, during the LED tutorial (David Wood, Zepheira) • NeOn,as an importan contributor in the creation and sharing of ontologies

5. OWL SKOS Terminology SIOC DC Ontologies FOAF LOD • It is quite a big effort to be continuously updated on new terms, acronyms, techonologies and their meaning.. but this is no big news, in particular in the IM area… • And you normally need time to get full understanding of these things. Daily work activities absorb our time.. • The “full immersion” of SemTech 2010 gave me a great opportunity to understand and learn a lot in one week! RDFa URI SPARQL GRDDL Provenance RDF/XML XBLR RDF store NLP N3 triples Turtle Jena

6. Web of data growing • Linked data sets are growing: DBpedia, Linked GeoData, FOAF profiles were among the first Linked Data Sets to be published • One of the most interesting announcement of the conference was that “Data.gov now hosts a set of Resource Description Framework (RDF) documents containing triples created by converting a number of the Data.gov datasets into this format, making over 6.4 billion triples of open government data available to the community” • Next?

7. Semantic web approach Dean Allemang • ...enterprises are finding that they are more like the Web than meets the eye. More and more, enterprises internally look like the Web, made up of multiple components with varied histories who have to share information in order to survive. • Semantic Web solutions aren't just a better way to solve certain information management problems: a Semantic Web approach is an essential part of a successful enterprise data strategy.

8. Evolving semantic technologies • No time to relax then.. New technologies, new search engines, new Data Sets, new vocabularies, new Semantic Search Engines are out there • SemTech 2010 described extensivley what we are to expect during these times (search en • Some generic recommendations are:- Publish your data: Raw data now! (Tim Berners-Lee, TED 2009)- Publish them in triples (serialze them with RDF-XML, RDFa, N3 or Turtle)- Use and adopt already-in-use vocabularies (FOAF, BIBO, SIOK, SKOS, DC, ...) - Relate when possible (skos:sameAs, etc.)

9. 2 billions triples --> Linked GeoData • 6.4 billions triples --> data.gov • 4.7 billions triples --> dbpedia LOD Data Sets..and FAO? Agricultural data is not well represented.. Will this be the case for AGRIS and its potential billion triples to become what PubMed is for public health? AGRIS

10. Drupal 7 • Drupal 7 should be soon released (when the list of bugs will be cleared) • Drupal 7 is adding significant support for RDFa. • It's the next version of Drupal, a publishing system used by websites like the White House and World Heath Organization. • With the inclusion of RDF in Drupal core, anyone who understands the basics of the RDF data model can create a Web 3.0 site in a few hours • Other adopters of RDFa include the Library of Congress and eGovernment.

11. Materials • Two books (actually I won one on a raffle..:-), some printed stuff and more than 130 presentations on pdf files. • I was of course only able to attend some of them • At \\odg_s01\oek\Anibaldi\SemTech2010\CD I stored the content of the CD containing all the materials I could get (run the AutoRun.exe file and access the Presentations or White Papers) • Two webcasts of two interesting keyonotes will be also available soon • Among the several presentations, I think that the more exaustive and informative are the tutorials on SPARQL and the Drupal7/RDF

12. Prepare your FOAF file, create a URI and publish your profile (in AIMS?) • This way, you are automatically publishing your triple for the Linked data community • The form below is a simple UI that allows you do it on the fly Getting started with Linked Data http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic

13. Thank you Questions?