The Power of Virtuoso Sponger Technology

Dear all:

I just found out that the Virtuoso Sponger technology is even more
powerful than I thought.

Briefly: "Spongers" create rich GoodRelations (and other RDF) meta-data
for existing Web pages on-the-fly. Other than traditional
screen-scraping approaches, Spongers reuse public APIs and other
techniques, so the data is of unprecedented degree of structure.

Now, this can be directly used in arbitrary queries... by simply using
the URI of the *existing* HTML Web page in the FROM clause of a SPARQL
query.

Example:


http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Web-Real-World-Applications-Industry/dp/0387485309

is a Web page in plain HTML offering a book. Amazon does not yet produce 
GoodRelations meta-data on their pages.

If you go to

     http://uriburner.com/sparql

and paste the URI in the "Default Graph URI " field and select "Retrieve
remote RDF for all missing source graphs", then a query like

    "SELECT * WHERE {?s ?p ?o} LIMIT 50"

returns a fully-fledged GoodRelations description for that page - as if
Amazon was already supporting GoodRelations for each of its > 4 million
items!

There are spongers for BestBuy, eBay, Zillow, and many other types of
resources.

Wow!

Congrats to Kingsley and his team!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
          http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-ontology-1535287

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-web-based-e-commerce-webmasters-get-ready.html

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Tutorial materials:
CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on 
Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Web_of_Data_for_E-Commerce_Tutorial_IEEE_CEC%2709