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SWOOP: a lightweight ontology editor
Last week I came accross the very nice SWOOP - "A Hypermedia-based Featherweight OWL Ontology Editor" as they say on their site. And I have to say it is very nice. It is much lighter than Protege and does not have all the functionality, but at least it works well. It would be nice if it could read and write N3 files, and not just RDF, as I much prefer to work with that format. You can browser your classes, find out dependencies, merge a number of ontologies, discover the level of your OWL ontology, and many more things I am sure.
Both of those tools are Java clients by the way :-)
Note: Seth Ladd points to some further advantages that I failed to mention.
Posted at 10:36PM Mar 23, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb |
Will France force Apple to Dream?
Following on an unsuccessful attempt to add a pretty unpleasant ammendment to a law in December, the French parliament is now in the process of passing a law that would force DRMed material to be readable on all platforms. Is this something that could have the happy consequence of forcing apple to the only acceptable Digital Rights Management Technology, Sun's open sourced DREAM?
Posted at 07:42PM Mar 23, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General |
The Semantic Grid
So Jonathan Schwartz has just announced Sun's opening of the Grid Network, for US citizens only to start off with. I have not had much time to look into grid computing myself, but I was recently made aware of an interesting Semantic Grid project. I don't know how the work there could relate to the service we have put online. There could be some fun things to do there. Any ideas?
Posted at 05:52PM Mar 23, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb |
Google Video introduces the Semantic Web
But the picture could be better.
A few months ago I put together a slide show to introduce the Semantic Web. In order to make the problem less abstract I try to present the Semantic web through a very practical problem faced by Software engineers and first presented by Fred Books in the 70ies in a very influential book The Mythical Man Month [1]. Simply put, adding more engineers to a project does not make it go faster. So how could the SemWeb affect software development in an Open Source world, where there are not only many more developers, but also these are distributed around the world with no central coordinating organisation? Having presented the problem, I then introduce RDF and Ontologies, how this meshes with the Sparql query language, and then show how one could use these technologies to make distributed software development a lot more efficient.
Having given the presentation in November last year, I spent some time over Xmas putting together a video of it (in h.264 format). The result is not too bad for a first attempt at adding sound to a slide show, though it may at points be a little slow I have to admit. It takes time to do this well, and I don't have time to improve it. So the video of my slide show presenation is a little long at 30 minutes, but it should be a good introduction for people with software engineering experience.
Then last week I thought it would be fun to put it online, and so I placed it on google video, where you can still find it. But you will notice that Google video reduces the quality quite dramatically, so that you will really need to have the pdf side by side, if you wish to follow. But if you can view the latest mpeg4 format (H.264) then you will find the this movie a lot clearer to watch [2].
Notes:
- the great thing about making things public is that 10 minutes after I did this, it was pointed out to me that I had mis named Brooks in the presentation. Ouch! It's easy to fix the slides, but fixing the video is going to be less pleasant :-(
- This movie is served with mime-type video/h264 but for some reason it does not open quicktime on OSX automatically when using Safari.
Posted at 12:38PM Mar 23, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[5]
