Re: Progress toward making RDF easier?

Hi Doerthe,

Thanks for that.

Hi everyone,

Concerning N3-rule-based machine reasoning (MR) I can point to our 
national project in Switzerland, based at the university of Basel.
It is focused on scholarly editing in Humanities, but providing a whole 
library of OWL-ontologies and a growing set of N3-rules, e.g. for 
calendar unification (Julian, Gregorian etc.) to Julian Day Number for 
temporal reasoning.
The development is on GitHub, among other repositories:
https://github.com/nie-ine/N3-rule-based_machine-reasoning
https://github.com/nie-ine/Ontologies
E.g. ontologies about time and calendar.

Previously I worked in biomed (Agfa Healthcare, Roche) and I think, 
independent from the knowledge domain, OWL-ontologies, RDF-data and 
N3-rules + MR (and SPARQL :) offer a good environment to formalize 
knowledge (beyond conversion of XML or SQL data to RDF) and answer 
research questions of all kinds. Of course it comes with an initial 
effort of creating ontologies to capture the needed domain knowledge, in 
consensus with domain specialists. But IMHO researchers get a lot back 
once the whole reaches a certain level of functionality. This counts for 
both academics and industry.

Kind regards,
Hans Cools

On 21.02.20 18:56, Doerthe Arndt wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> the initial email chain on this topic contained several topics (and 
> was followed by a discussion about their importance, but I will leave 
> that discussion to others :) ). One of the topics was bringing forward 
> rule-based reasoning in the Semantic Web.
>
> As a reaction on that particular point, a call to action was issued 
> regarding a W3C community group on the N3 rule language. We are happy 
> to say that many people heeded this call – since then we’ve had a many 
> fruitful discussions on its syntax, semantics and built-ins for 
> real-world use cases, and made concrete progress towards its 
> standardization. You can refer to its GitHub page 
> <https://github.com/w3c/N3/issues> for details on these discussions.
>
> We believe that N3 could represent a significant step forward in 
> making RDF more usable:
>
>
>   * /Writing N3 is easy/. N3 seamlessly extends the RDF Turtle syntax,
>     introducing constructs such as embedded (“cited”) graphs and lists
>     as first-class citizens, which solve well-known problems with RDF
>     reification and first-rest RDF list chains.
>
>     In fact, we’ve shown that N3 can support different semantics for
>     embedded graphs out-of-the-box, and aligned these with the
>     possible RDF dataset semantics [1].N3 has a model semantics that
>     has been defined here [2, 3].
>
>   * /You can write rules in N3/. One can directly write IF-THEN rules
>     in N3, possibly accompanied with explicit quantifiers, to
>     operationalize the N3 data. We point out that this avoids the
>     impedence mismatch of other rule languages that require special
>     effort for integration with RDF (e.g., RIF).
>
> //
>
>   * /You can utilize powerful N3 built-ins/. The goal is to give N3
>     the expressivity and tools to solve real-world problems – an N3
>     document should be a self-sufficient solution to a problem, and
>     not require intervention from external software (again cfr.
>     impedence mismatch). For instance, N3 implemented a (scoped)
>     negation as failure from the start – other current proposals
>     include built-ins for a kind of scoped universal quantification
>     and non-monotonic features.
>
>   * /You can directly consume Linked Data/. N3 has a set of built-ins
>     that allow (a) retrieving Linked Data, (b) parsing it as N3, and
>     (c) deriving conclusions from it. This makes N3 a language that is
>     truly suitable for the Web of Data.
>
> Of course, there is still much work to be done and we welcome everyone 
> who is willing to help :). We are furthermore very interested in all 
> discussions and suggestions to make rule-based reasoning a frequently 
> used part of the Semantic Web.
>
> Kind regards,
> Dörthe Arndt an William van Woensel (on behalf of the N3 community group)
>
>
>
> [1] D. Arndt and W. Van Woensel, “Towards supporting multiple 
> semantics of named graphs using N3 rules 
> <http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2438/paper6.pdf>,” presented at the 13th 
> RuleML+RR 2019 Doctoral Consortium and Rule Challenge, Bolzano, Italy, 
> 2019, vol. 2438, pp. 1–15.
>
> [2] D. Arndt, T. Schrijvers, J. De Roo, and R. Verborgh, “Implicit 
> quantification made explicit : how to interpret blank nodes and 
> universal variables in Notation3 Logic 
> <https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8627430/file/8632611.pdf>,” 
> /JOURNAL OF WEB SEMANTICS/, vol. 58, pp. 1–25, 2019.
>
> [3] D. Arndt, “Notation3 as the unifying logic for the semantic web 
> <https://github.com/doerthe/PhD/blob/master/main.pdf>,” Ghent 
> University. Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Ghent, Belgium, 2019.
>
> Am 20.02.20 um 23:30 schrieb David Booth:
>> In 2018 there was a big discussion about RDF being too hard for 
>> *average* developers (middle 33%) to adopt, and why.  Ideas were 
>> captured and discussion continued on the W3C EasierRDF github site:
>> https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF
>>
>> In 2019 the problem was discussed further both at the W3C Graph 
>> Workshop in Berlin
>> https://tinyurl.com/EasierBerlin
>> and at the US Semantic Technology Symposium (US2TS) held at Duke 
>> University:
>> https://tinyurl.com/EasierDuke
>>
>> At the upcoming 2020 US2TS we will propose and discuss Next Steps 
>> Toward Easier RDF:
>> https://us2ts.org/program-easier-rdf
>>
>> However, in preparation for that event, I am curious to know what 
>> significant progress others think has been made in the past year, 
>> toward making RDF easier to adopt.  For example, one good resource 
>> that came to my attention in the past year is the "Awesome Semantic 
>> Web" list maintained on github:
>> https://github.com/semantalytics/awesome-semantic-web
>>
>> What else?  Thoughts?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David Booth
>>
> -- 
> Dörthe Arndt
> Researcher Semantic Web
> imec - Ghent University - IDLab | Faculty of Engineering and Architecture | Department of Electronics and Information Systems
> Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 122, 9052 Ghent, Belgium
> t: +32 9 331 49 59 | e:doerthe.arndt@ugent.be