New tools: Sindice Inspector, Full Cache API – all with Online Data Reasoning

Full announcement at
http://blog.sindice.com/2009/10/12/new-inspector-full-cache-api-all-with-online-data-reasoning/

quotable text:
-------------------

We’re happy to release today 2 distinct yet interplaying features in
Sindice: The Sindice Inspector and the Sindice Cache API (both
including Sindice’s Online Data Reasoning).

A) Sindice Inspector

- Takes anything with structured data on (RDF, RDFa, Microformats),
and provides several handy ways:

    * in a “Sigma” based view
    * a novel card/frame based view
    * a SVG based interactive graph view (a la google map)
    * sortable triples, with prettyprint namespace support
    * full ontology tree view for Online Data Reasoning debugging

- Does live Online Data Reasoning: allows a data publisher to see
which ontologies are implicitly or explicitly (directly or indirectly,
via other ontologies) and

    * visualizes the full closure of inferred statements using different colors.
    * provides a tree of the ontologies in use and their dependencies.

Ways to use it:

    * a tool from Sindice.com (the inspect tab on the homepage) or the
Inspector Homepage
    * a Bookmarklet (drag it to your bookmark bar and use while browsing)
    * an API either raw (Any23 output, no reasoning) or with reasoning
    * to send links to structured data files around, every
visualization has its own permalink.

Examples:

    * Sortable Triples with Reasoning Closure (try)
http://sindice.com/developers/inspector/?url=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Lough_Corrib&doReasoning=true#triples
    * Ontology Import Tree of Axel Polleres’s DERI foaf file (try
notice how the GEO ontology and the DCTerms elements are only imported
indirectly via other ontologies but yet contribute to the reasoning)
http://sindice.com/developers/inspector?doReasoning=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deri.ie%2Ffileadmin%2Fscripts%2Ffoaf.php%3Fid%3D58#ontologies
    * Graph of the RDF representation of Axel’s Facebook public
profile (from microformats)
http://sindice.com/developers/inspector/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FAxelPolleres%3F_fb_noscript%3D1#graph
    * All the data in a eventful.com page
http://sindice.com/developers/inspector/?url=http%3A%2F%2Feventful.com%2Fwinnipeg%2Fevents%2Fmetallica-%2FE0-001-025118008-2#fullcontent

B) Sindice Cache API

Tired of your favorite data being offline now and then? convinced that
you can’t really do a linked data application without any network
safety net? rejoice :-) . With the Sindice Cache API you can:

    * access and retrieve any of the currently 64 million RDF sources
in Sindice with a simple REST api;
    * access and retrieve the full set of inferred triples created by
Online Data Reasoning (instant access to the precomputed closure, 0
wait time);
    * visualize the cache with the same handy tools as available in
the inspector. Just try from any Sindice result page.

Feel free to use Sindice Cache with reasoning as a fallback service
when data is not available and as a way to add full recursive ontology
importing + reasoning support to your application (with none of the
massive pain associated with the full procedure). A document you need
is not in the cache? just ping the URL in and it will be available
within minutes;

———————————-

But what is Online Data Reasoning exactly? Background and implementation

When RDF/RDFa data is put out there on the web, the “explicit”
information given in the data is just part of the story. Reasoning is
a process by which the vocabulary used in the data (Ontologies) are
analyzed to extract new pieces of information (otherwise implicit) –
e.g. giving a “date of birth” to an “agent” would makes that a
“person”.

Typically, Semantic Web software have manually imported the ontologies
they needed. If ontologies are published using W3C best practices,
however, it becomes possible to do the entire process automatically:
ontological properties can be resolved (i.e. as they are resolvable
URIs, they are HTTP fetched) and therefore all can be imported
automatically …

… but ontologies can import other ontologies, and form circles and so on.

Read all at http://blog.sindice.com/2009/10/12/new-inspector-full-cache-api-all-with-online-data-reasoning/


Credits:

Reasoning Services and methodology [1] – Renaud Delbru, Michele
Catasta, Robert Fuller

Data extraction – Any23 library – http://code.google.com/p/any23/ –
Richard Cyganiak, Jurgen Umbrich, Michele Catasta

User interface and frontend programming – Szymon Danielczyk

The Card/Frame and SVG visualization courtesy of http://rhizomik.net/
– thanks especially to Roberto Garcia who supported us during his
visit this summer with his wife Rosa and little Victor :-) hi guys.

Sindice is a research project at DERI and is supported by Science
Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/02/CE1/I131, by the OKKAM
Project (ICT-215032) and by the ROMULUS project (ICT-217031).

[1] R. Delbru, A. Polleres, G. Tummarello and S. Decker. Context
Dependent Reasoning for Semantic Documents in Sindice. In Proceedings
of the 4th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge
Base Systems (SSWS). Kalrsruhe, Germany, 2008.

Received on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 00:06:12 UTC