Re: Non SemWeb uses of RDF

This seems pretty interesting.

There is a similar project being done n the area of augmentative
communication - essentially using RDF as the base format for a message, with
the ability to present it in a variety of graphical or tesxtual forms. The
primary use case is people who cannot read, write, or speak - most typically
because of a severe intellectual disability or severe brain trauma.

http://dewey.computing.ac.dundeee.uk/ccf/

I used RDF for managing legal information in a case that required tracking
stuff across italian, french, english and australian law and people. Basing
myself on FOAF (which is good PIM stuff) and Dublin Core (for documents) it
was easy enough to track who had read what where in whuich version -
something that traditional legal systems need but which is often done by
lawyers remembering things or writing them on paper. (RDF is more like a card
catalogue than traditional XML, because with it you can scribble down any
extra information you like...)

For various reasons there is no trace of this stuff left, as far as I know.
Except a letter from the Ministero Pubblico declaring that I have no case
left to answer.

EARL is a W3C-based effort to provide reporting on quality assurance
assessments - basically for business assets, according to whichever set of
business rules you apply. Its genesis came from reporting the accessibility
of Web Content to people with disabilities (since this is a legal requirement
for businesses in many countries), but it was designed to be generally
applicable to reporting QA-type information. Unfortunately the group
responsible for it went into a long hiatus, so development has been less
coordinated than most W3C work, but that group is reportedly restarting in
the beginning of the new year. In the meantime, tools have taken up the work
available and been deployed.

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/talks/0311-earl/all is about the most
up-to-date source of links, I think.

Sun's "swordfish" program, collecting data on their products, and I assume on
their human resources (so you can find out things like "do we still have
anyone working in Europe who was involved with the development of the
interface buses for the sparcstation 3?") might be what you are interested
in.

I am hoping to launch a project with a large company involved in various
kinds of specialised construction work to do something similar, and I believe
that Airbus and Renault are among companies that have also done this using
RDF.

All these are, in my mind, "Semantic Web" applications in the sense that the
"Semantic Web" is a catch-all term for describing the use of technology based
on the Web (RDF, HTTP, XML, ...) to provide enough "meaning", in ways that
can be interoperably processed, that computers can do more useful tasks for
us. An analogy is the idea of intranets and extranets based on HTTP - are
they "Web" projects or not? Like W3C's own Intranet (which is a bit of the
Web that is not accessible to everyone), the work done in these areas is
clearly using the same technology that you find on the public web, including
security to ensure that access is available only to those people authorised -
a standard business practice.

Cheers

Chaals

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:

>A wildly different application :-) :
...

Received on Sunday, 19 December 2004 01:25:52 UTC