Re: discussion about Semantic Web realization

>> We cooperate with Moldova State University, Technological University 
>> and Economics Academy. They already started work on adding semantic 
>> technologies to their post-graduates curriculum.
> Good to know! Are any of these materials online? Even if not in 
> English, it is good to be able to take a look around such things.
>
Nothing is online yet, but I will put something together, including 
contact info of the teachers participating in this, and will send to 
you. In Moldova, they speak three languages - Romanian (native), Russian 
(practically same as native) and English (pretty good) - we can have 
most of materials in English. I came to IT from Academia, where I did 
reasearch and taught mathematical logics. So, I know this world pretty 
good - if you plan ever to help with curricula or something else, would 
be happy to help.
> Another suggestion here (and a general one, to all 
> listmembers/countries) is that arranging for inter-site visits may be 
> a good way to build up skills and connections that bind the Semantic 
> Web community together better. A related approach is through events 
> like workshops and conferences. I think in general outsourcing is 
> easier when there has been some prior face-to-face contact, or 
> collaboration/discussion through standards work (such as this list), 
> opensource toolkits etc.
We would be happy to host such a meeting in Moldova. From this side we 
can arrage involvement of
- Research organizations in Moldova, including the Academy of Sciences 
(the President of AS candidated for Moldova President, and might 
candidate again in 2009 - he knows about SW)
- Moscow University, Russia (I graduated, did doctoral research and 
taught there for a short time)
- The members of Government  (they sponsored a conference on 
e-governement systems recently and we shared about advantages of 
semantic features above EDI)
I am sure we can get support from the Government even for a large Forum 
for ex-Soviet countries (Moldova is an active member of CIS - the 
successor USSR).
Let me extend an invitation to W3C members to visit Moldova and 
SemanticSoft with any other occasion they visit Europe.
>> Now, I will share two thoughts on Maciej's message, which precisely 
>> articulates the problems of growth of SW.
>>
>> 1. Search engines are not alternative, but complementary to SW. 
>> Really, SW is about *integration* on the global scale and *building* 
>> the logical layer of the web, and SE is about *search* in the 
>> *presentation layer*.  SE and SW live in different spaces - they 
>> cannot compete.
>>
>> 2. I will try to articulate the problem which stay in SW progress 
>> towards industry and on  how to overcome it.
>>
>> SW works only with *descriptions* - SW tools process only 
>> descriptions. On the other side, we have the classic web, which works 
>> with *resources* 
>
> (I'll read that as "document-like resources"; "resource" in the strict 
> SW sense simply means "thing", while in other groups it meant 
> something a bit like "page")
I meant here "application resources" but I wrote "resources" for 
shortness. Generally, we try to use terms in strict SW sense. We are 
waiting for the release of WWWA ontology to be sure on strictness.
> Sounds like nice work. Do you see any scope for a common 
> architecture/design with the recently announced Drupal RDF effort? 
> They again are building RDF/SW descriptions into a system based around 
> a resource/document repository, eg see 
> http://groups.drupal.org/node/9010 and 
> http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/rdf-and-semantic-web-drupal
>
> There are also some commonalities with OpenLink and Talis's work. 
> Which is all good: not meant as a criticism. I think we're all 
> figuring out what shape RDF/SW application software will take; at the 
> moment the closests we have to interchangable software pieces for RDF 
> are parsers, databases and SPARQL engines. I'm very interested to see 
> whether higher level functionality also gets created to shared 
> interfaces, so implementations could compete on their merits, and 
> users have improved app portability between them.

It would be great to cooperate with Drupal RDF effort. Their approach 
sounds closer to another our project which is not over - "Chameleon". 
This will be a CMS where you can export/import web content into RDF and 
send the file to another Chameleon site which will restore it as web 
content. By web content we mean everything you can see on a site, 
including the interactive UI controls. Chameleon will be an "empty" 
site, with an engine behind it, which
(1) Builds the web content from its RDF description
(2) Compiles the RDF description from the web content which you build 
visually, through UI
You can get first impression of Chameleon if you press Try under 
SemanticSite on our home page. There is no Help yet, but we tried to 
make it intuitive enough so that with some guesswork, anybody could 
build a site, intranet or other web-based application without technical 
skills (semantical features must be ready by middle summer)

> BTW looking at http://www.semanticsoft.net/semanticwebtools.html ... I 
> read "Currently, Semantic Server comes with its own SPARQL processor 
> which is also visual. The user can draw a diagram of the query - the 
> tool builds the query and displays it result." ... is this your own 
> SPARQL implementation, or do you build on top of an existing toolkit?
This is our own Java implementation of SPARQLversion  June 15 2007.
Generally, we have our proprietary SW development framework based on 
conceptual A3 approach. It does not have only the XML part of RDF/XML 
presentation, which we are using from Jena.
> cheers,
> Dan

Thank you,
Ioachim

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 21:25:39 UTC