The Semantic Web Gang we are joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion of efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere. Listen to the podcast.
“Semantic web technology” is being used to reconnect Colombians displaced in the country’s civil conflict.
“The displaced population in Colombia is the most vulnerable because their fundamental rights are massively violated,” Juan Sequeda, who works on the project, told the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.
“Their [physical] social networks are weakened.”
The international team aim to use smart technology to allow people to search currently incompatible databases of missing persons. Often families are split up in the process. When this happens, they are told to register their details on a national database - known as the unique registry of displaced persons - set up by the Colombian government.
However, other registries have been set up by NGO groups - such as the Red Cross - meaning the displaced millions are spread over several databases.
Frustratingly for those who have lost connection with their families, these databases don’t “talk” to each other or share information.
Researchers aim to solve this problem by creating a “semantic knowledge layer”, which will link crucial information (such as names, addresses, age, etc.) across all the databases.
Semantic technology is seen by some as the next step for the world wide web, as it allows a much richer understanding of huge data sets.
In Colombia, this should mean that searching for specific people will be more effective and allow people to ask complex queries such as “how many cousins do I have in Bogota?”.
“It’s all about how you integrate data,” said Mr Sequeda.
In a recent podcast interview (by Eric Miller),Ivan Herman gives an overview of recent Semantic web
Ivan Herman
development activity. He talks about how in the past year all the primary components of the semantic web have come into place for developing new applications. Linked Data, Microformats, OWL, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL have all been established now as universal formats for linking data. He mentions that the SPARQL workgroup at w3c has continued working to refine the query language for retrieving semantic search information. He discusses the development of OWL 2 which addresses many of the shortcomings of OWL 1. He explains the the RDF framework as a means of linking open data on the web as a necessary evolution of web published data along the road to achieving a semantic web. “Whether or not you say semantic web or web of data is just a matter of terminology”.
Herman highlights how the Health science and pharmaceutical industries and have been the quickest to experiment with and deploy semantic applications. There have always been large public databases on medical and biological information and they have been motivated early on, in integrating these divergent databases through linked data formats like RDF.
Some of the core w3c work groups involved in refining the semantic web components can be found at the w3c site including:
The Semantic Web Coordination Group is tasked to provide a forum for managing the interrelationships and interdependencies among groups focusing on standards and technologies that relate to this goals of the Semantic Web Activity. This group is designed to coordinate, facilitate and (where possible) help shape the efforts of other related groups to avoid duplication of effort and fragmentation of the Semantic Web by way of incompatible standards and technologies.
This Working Group is chartered to produce a core rule language plus extensions which together allow rules to be translated between rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. The Working Group will have to balance the needs of a community diverse including Business Rules and Semantic users Web specifying extensions for which it can articulate a consensus design and which are sufficiently motivated by use cases.
The mission of the OWL Working Group, is to produce a W3C Recommendation that refines and extends the 2004 version of OWL. The proposed extensions are a small set that: have been identified by users as widely needed, and have been identified by tool implementers as reasonable and feasible extensions to current tools.
Formerly known as RDF Data Access Working Group, it developed the SPARQL Query Language recommendation published in January 2008. The group is currently chartered to make small updates to the SPARQL specification that have been identified as users and implementers as feasible and useful extensions.
The mission of this Working Group is to provide guidance in the form of W3C Technical Reports on issues of practical RDF development and deployment practices in the areas of publishing vocabularies, OWL usage, and integrating RDF with HTML documents.
This group is also responsible for the development of the RDFa and SKOS specifications.
The Semantic Web Interest Group is a forum for W3C Members and non-Members to discuss innovative applications of the Semantic Web. The Interest Group also initiates discussion on potential future work items related to enabling technologies that support the Semantic Web, and the relationship of that work to other activities of W3C and to the broader social and legal context in which the Web is situated.
The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group is designed to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the health care and life science industries. Aiding decision-making in clinical research, Semantic Web technologies will bridge many forms of biological and medical information across institutions.