RE: Semantic Suggestions please ...

Neil,

This is getting easier to do, and Mark points out the value of RDFa to
assist. Two things available publicly that you might want to look at, as
they might expedite your goal.

Thompson Reuter's Calais project (www.opencalais.org) seems useful for
content that has strong public entity identification - and your content
seems to fall into that category. It is an API service that does entity
extraction based on their large db of known entities, and returns the
identified entities as tags that you can embed in your content. High profile
public uses of this include plug-ins for WordPress and Drupal, and Gnosis -
a FireFox plug-in provided by ClearForest. However, this may be a quick way
help to generate tags for all your unstructured content (not magic - you
still need to review and add your own specific tags).

There are probably a few other extraction tools around - let me know if you
want me to pull further references.

Also, Yahoo's launch of SearchMonkey developer environment
(http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/) includes good simple
documentation on embedding RDFa into web pages, and a growing community of
search tool developers looking to consume it!

Finally, www.ecoresearch.net is an interesting news aggregator focused on
climate change and energy. I'm not sure your journal fits their model, but
you might want to share it with your colleagues as an example of the types
of things you could do.

I hope that helps,

Duane Degler
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-semweb-ui-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-semweb-ui-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Mark Birbeck
> Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 8:24 AM
> To: neil@oilit.com
> Cc: public-semweb-ui@w3.org; semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Semantic Suggestions please ...
> 
> 
> Hi Neil,
> 
> Over on the RDFa list you berate the group for not eating 
> their own dogfood, saying we should be providing something 
> 'more' than just a wiki and a list.
> 
> :)
> 
> But the main point of RDFa was actually to enhance the kind 
> of pages you are talking about.
> 
> Adding RDFa to your pages gives two benefits. The first is 
> that other people can then consume your data, if they have an 
> RDFa parser. It's just the same as consuming an RSS feed from 
> your server, except the data is RDF.
> 
> (Of course you could publish your data as RDF/XML to get the 
> same effect, but then you would two sets of pages, one for 
> RDF and one for
> HTML.)
> 
> The other benefit of publishing RDFa in your pages is that 
> you can enhance the end-user experience. Take a look at this 
> example, which publishes a page with some RDFa in it, and 
> then uses a JS library to post-process that RDFa to both 
> geo-code any addresses, as well as add
> maps:
> 
>   <http://webbackplane.com/node/63>
> 
> That's just one example of what can be done with the embedded 
> data -- it could just as easily be used to derive share 
> prices for your companies, thumbnails for your people and 
> products...and so on. The key thing though is that the same 
> data is being used both by other servers and the client-side JS.
> 
> We're using exactly these techniques for a project for the UK 
> government at the moment, and since this is exactly what RDFa 
> was invented for, I have no doubt that the same techniques 
> would enhance your site, too.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mark
> 
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Neil McNaughton 
> <neil@oilit.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Semantic Websters
> >
> > Our website Oil IT Journal www.oilit.com has about a 
> million words of 
> > reporting on oil and gas IT. It is moderately well organized stuff, 
> > but there are a lot of 'unstructured' items (such as company names, 
> > people and
> > products) that I imagine could usefully be tagged somehow for 
> > discovery and reuse. I was wondering if this could be 
> achieved by something semantic?
> >
> > In the run in to the first Semantic Technology for Energy - Oil and 
> > Gas
> > (http://www.w3.org/2008/07/ogws-cfp) I would like your 
> suggestions on 
> > the above in order to see if there is a small (but 
> hopefully killer) 
> > contribution that we could make to advance this technology.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Neil McNaughton
> >
> > Editor, Oil IT Journal (www.oilit.com)
> >
> > Technology Watch Service
> > The Data Room
> > www.oilit.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Mark Birbeck, webBackplane
> 
> mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com
> 
> http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
> 
> webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company 
> number 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 
> Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR)
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2008 02:55:52 UTC