Re: Is there real world RDF-S/OWL instance data?

I appreciate that your request was for publicly-available instance data, 
but as a possibly-minor footnote to this thread (especially given its 
title), I'd note (again) that the *publicly-available* instance data 
doesn't necessarily include all *real world* instance data.  You mention 
copyright issues as one possible reason why this might be, but there are 
other reasons why such data might not be made generally-available (and, 
of course, such a decision makes it hard to ferret out the data).

An example is data defined according to the electric utility Common 
Information Model (see, e.g., Section 6.5 of the RDF Primer).  The 
Common Information Model is an IEC standard used for the integration of 
systems within the electric utility industry worldwide (the RDF Schema 
for this model is defined in IEC 61970-501).  There is certainly lots of 
instance data conforming to this model (e.g., describing every piece of 
equipment in an electrical substation), but utilities tend to restrict 
use of that data to interchange between applications (and other 
utilities), and I can see why a utility might not want to make this 
available on the (public) Web.

I don't know how many other applications might be like this (as I 
mentioned above, because they're not all that public, they're hard to 
ferret out), but the issue of non-public data is worth considering in 
the context of assessing the importance of the Semantic Web.  Certainly 
as the use of Semantic Web technology increases in "real" applications, 
you're going to see it increasingly used for applications where the 
data, for one reason or another, has to be access-controlled in one way 
or another, and thus it won't be openly available.  For example, if the 
Semantic Web were used for electronic patient records, that data 
wouldn't be openly available either, but that would be an important use 
of the Semantic Web (IMHO).

--Frank

Sören Auer wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> As an argument to stress the importance of the Semantic Web and as 
> example data to evaluate tools it would be nice to have a library of 
> real world RDF-S/OWL instance data available. My impression is, that 
> there are many schemas around, but it's harder to find real life 
> instance data. This might be due to copyright issues or the fact, that 
> the borderline between classes/schema and instances/data is not always 
> clearly marked and some projects rather use a representation as classes 
> than a representation as instance data.
> 
> So, if you know of RDF-S/OWL instance data which is publicly available 
> and shows an interesting application please let us know. I'm especially, 
> interested in the impact of its usage. ;-)
> 
> The following is interesting Semantic Web data I know of:
> 
> * Wordnet - a lexical database for the English language [1]
> * UNSPSC (Universal Standard Products and Services Classification) 
> representation as classes [2]
> * Wikipedia in RDF [3]
> * Open Directory DMOZ in RDF [4]
> * Open Bio-Medical Ontologies in OWL (rep. as classes) [5]
> * FOAF - Friend of a Friend (many small instances available on the Web) [6]
> 
> I will summarize all statements and post it to the list again and maybe 
> create some wikipage for persistent reference.
> 
> --Sören
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/WNET/wn-conversion.html
> [2] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mcaklein/unspsc/
> [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RDF
> [4] http://rdf.dmoz.org/
> [5] http://www.fruitfly.org/~cjm/obo-download/
> [6] http://www.foaf-project.org/
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 August 2006 16:43:08 UTC