SWAD-Europe newsletter, April 2004

SWAD-Europe Newsletter, April 2004

Welcome to the fourth SWAD-Europe newsletter.

SWAD-Europe (Semantic Web Advanced Development in Europe) is an
EU-funded project which aims to support W3C's Semantic Web initiative
in Europe, providing targeted research, demonstrations and outreach to
ensure Semantic Web technologies move into the mainstream of networked
computing.
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/

This newsletter is a monthly summary of work from the project and
selected Frequently Asked Questions and answers, written by a variety of
project participants.

In this issue:

News
1. SWAD-Europe and the ECOinformatics Initiative
2. XML Europe 2004

FAQs
3. How do I validate RDF?
4. Some thoughts on RDF rendering

More detailed discussions on these topics are available on the project
weblog:
http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/2004_04.html
http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/


News
1. SWAD-Europe and the ECOinformatics Initiative

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hosted the first
Environmental Thesaurus and Terminology Workshop this week in Geneva.
The Workshop is part of the broader ECOinformatics Initiative, which is
working to facilitate co-operation between organisations and projects
working in the area of enviromental information.

SWAD-Europe was represented at the workshop by myself. I gave a
presentation on recent developments in the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus
Activity.

I was very impressed to find that, although this was the first meeting
of this group, there was a strong coherence in the vision, goals and
expertise of its members. Developing web services for accessing
terminologies and thesauri via the internet was a major theme of the
workshop, and received unanimous interest. In this context I presented
the SKOS API, a generic application programming interface for a
thesaurus web service which is being developed as part of the
SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity. The API was well received, and we hope
to involve members of this community in its further development and
testing.

--Alistair Miles

Read more: http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/000052.html

Alistair's presentation:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/pres/swade_unep_apr_2004.ppt
SWAD-Europe thesaurus activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/


2. XML Europe 2004 - trip report

Last week I attended XML Europe in sunny Amsterdam at the RAI and made
notes in some sessions I attended. So far I've not been able to get on
with live blogging, rather I've been doing live talking to people during
the conference.
--Dave Beckett

Read more: http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/000054.html

See also:
XMLEurope 2004 Proceedings: http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xmle04/
Steve Cayzer's paper:
http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xmle04/index/author/7691905a7307fb7f2731ee67e8.html
report on Monday: http://planb.nicecupoftea.org/archives/000536.html


FAQs

3. FAQ: How do I validate RDF?

Validation for RDF can mean a variety of different terms especially
where RDF is using XML and several layers of technology are connected.
This FAQ describes validation for RDF and answers how to do it for the
different technologies.

Validation is a tricky word to consider, and often used with schema,
which can also have several different interpretations. There is
validation of syntax (XML validation, RDF/XML - RDF's XML syntax) as
well as RDF schema validation.

That means you can do:

   1. XML validation against an XML schema, also called XML schema
validation
   2. RDF/XML validation of the syntax that it matches the RDF/XML
Syntax Specification (Revised) W3C Recommendation
   3. RDF schema validation

--Dave Beckett

Read more: http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/000051.html


4. Some thoughts on RDF rendering

As part of the Semantic Portals work we've had to create a browsing
utility that presents a web based UI for viewing and navigating a set of
RDF descriptions (of environmental organizations). This blog note
captures a few thoughts on how to go about this based on our experiences
with the current prototype.

Many applications have a need to render RDF in human-readable form.

In some cases the requirement is to present a complete and accurate
visualization of the RDF for people familar with the RDF model. There
are many tools which support this both graphical (e.g. IsaViz,
visualizer) and textual (e.g. brownsauce).

In other cases the need is to present an application specific UI which
contains some data extracted from the RDF. In that case some form of
template-driven rendering approach seems appropriate. There are some
tools for this (e.g. RDFStyles) as well as general XSLT-for-RDF
proposals (e.g. treehugger, RDF Template, RDF Twig) which could be used
for rendering directly to XHTML.

--Dave Reynolds

Read more: http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/000053.html



Visit the SWAD-Europe website:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/intro.html

and weblog:
http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/

for ongoing information about the project.

Received on Friday, 7 May 2004 05:35:32 UTC