SWEO community project "Linking Open Data on the Semantic Web"

Hi all,

the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group wishes to 
encourage communities of developers to come together to work on some Semantic 
Web projects.

See  http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects

There is currently a project forming called "Linking Open Data on the Semantic 
Web".

See http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. There 
are already various interesting open data sources available on the Web. Examples 
include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP 
bibliography and many more which are published under Creative Commons or Talis 
licenses.

The goal of the Linking Open Data project is to make various open data sources 
available on the Web as RDF and to set RDF links between data items from 
different data sources.

There are already several RDF data publishing efforts. Examples include the 
dbpedia.org project, the Geonames ontology and the D2R Server publishing the 
DBLP bibliography. There are also initial efforts to interlink these data 
sources. For instance, the dpedia RDF descriptions of geographic places include 
60 000 owl:sameAs links to the corresponding place in Geonames. Another example 
is the RDF Book Mashup which links book authors to paper authors within the DBLP 
bibliography.

The motivation behind the community project is that for demonstrating the value 
of the Semantic Web it is essential to have more real-world data online. RDF is 
also the obvious technology to interlink data from various sources.

Having such a huge interlinked dataset online would be beneficial for various 
Semantic Web development areas, including Semantic Web browsers and other user 
interfaces, Semantic Web crawlers, RDF repositories and reasoning engines.

There is already quite a number of people who want to take part in this effort, 
including in (alphabetical order): Sören Auer, Danny Ayers, Chris Bizer, Richard 
Cyganiak, Tom Heath, Kingsley Idehen, Orri Erling, Frederick Giasson, Felix Van 
de Maele, Stefano Mazzocchi, Josh Tauberer, Bernard Vatant and Marc Wick.

If you also want to contribute just add your name to the Wiki page.

The project has started to collect relevant material on several wiki pages, so 
that we get an overview about what is already there and what is currently 
happening. There are currently the following pages: Datasets, RDFizers, 
Publishing Tools, Semantic Web Clients, Equivalence Mining and Matching 
Frameworks, Commonly used Vocabularies, Ontologies and Micromodels.

Please feel free to add additional information to these pages.

There have been lots of interesting mail discussions around the project in the 
last days. So we decided that we need a mailing list to properly archive all 
this useful information. The address of the list is 
linking-open-data@simile.mit.edu

Lots of thanks to Stefano Mazzocchi and the SIMILE project for hosting the list.

If you want to stay up-to-date on what is happening in the community project, 
you can subscribe to the list at 
http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/linking-open-data.

I think having more interlinked RDF data published on the Web is essential for 
showing other communities the benefits of the Semantic Web.

Up to now, the community project has already gained quite some momentum and with 
a bit of luck we might be able to bootstrap the Semantic Web as a whole.

Cheers,

Chris


--
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
Phone: +49 30 838 54057
Mail: chris@bizer.de
Web: www.bizer.de

Received on Wednesday, 7 February 2007 10:21:25 UTC