Semantic.edu, an introduction

The Semantic Web
The state of play for liberal arts campuses
December 2009
NITLE Research
( http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/archives/046534.html )

Today’s hour
Agenda
sketch of semantic field
spectrum of uses (campus + world)
discussion of uses
What you can take away
general awareness of emerging tech
pointer to interesting projects
ideas for projects you can do
network with each other

What is the Semantic Web?
A set of technologies
full stack includes:
RDF
OWL
SPARQL
RDFa
… and also NLP
http://obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-web/semantic-web-architecture.html

Policies, practices, strategies
interoperability (“The Semantic Web is a web of data”, W3C)
openness
linked data
"data integration is the name of the game"
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, 2008,
http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=105

businesses growing
Sites
Tools
Consulting

A set of technologies?
Web content with:
Identifiers
Exposed metadata (triples)
Links
“ By May 2009 this had grown to 4.2 billion RDF triples, interlinked by around 142 million RDF links.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

What is the Semantic Web? W3C, Alice in Semantic Wonderland http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/alice-example.html
RDFa example
Properties assigned

How can this be used?
External resources, under the hood
Semantic tools and services
Plug-ins and add-ons
Campus projects
Pedagogies and research

External resources, under the hood http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0830-Nanjing-IH/ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_data.php

External resources, under the hood
More:
Tripit, http://www.tripit.com/
Dapper MashupAds, http://www.dapper.net/
Snapshots, http://snap.com
BooRah, http://boorah.com

"Semantic Knowledge Databases“, like Twine
Example: Faviki: semantic social bookmarking
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_what_is_the_killer_app.php

Presentation and visualization
( http://www.sioc.me/ ) ( http://www.sioc.me/ )

Derive categories, drive suggestions
Tagaroo for WordPress, http://tagaroo.opencalais.com/

Others:
Zemanta, http://www.zemanta.com/
Semantic Mediawiki, http://www.semanticmediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Semantic tool in play: ClearForest Gnosis, FF plugin

Public museum projects (Powerhouse, Australia) http://tinyurl.com/yq66ss

Campus projects
Enterprise or medium-scale architecture strategies
repository (example: http://dspace.nitle.org/ )
general campus-housed documentation
revise metadata strategy and/or run local app
Rely on growing number of helper apps (i.e., Triplify, GRDDL, etc.)

Campus projects
Why do such a thing?
Campus research and connections
Outreach
Open content - connect with some academic projects, like OAI
"make your information more programmable" (Reuters, Tim O’Reilly interview, February 2008, http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/reuters-ceo-sees-semantic-web.html )

Campus projects
Example: Vitro (Cornell, http://vivo.cornell.edu )
-across departments, admin. units

Campus projects
Ontology editor available: http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/
Needed: Java, Apache Tomcat and Ant, MySQL, Subversion
Howto: create an ontology, then populate
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/VITROUSERS/Home

Campus projects
NIH funds Vitro-powered multi-campus science collaboration
http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/the_american_recovery_and_reinvestment_act/20091102.asp

How: use preceding tools
Why?
information literacy: better, smarter search
information aggregation, or "knowledge construction" (Jason Ohler)
collaborative work, finding and facilitation
computer science class projects

CS: create semantic tools
Example: Welkin, from MIT’s SIMILE
http://simile.mit.edu/welkin/

Limitations
too geeky, not visible
perceived expense
no killer app
complexity and scale of overall semantic enterprise
ecological growth means natural selection

What to do with it?
Your turn.

What next?
What do you see?
More tools
More RDF-readable data exposed
New functions
RDFa->HTML5?
Applying SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) to references

Some resources
ENSEMBLE
http://www.ensemble.ac.uk/
Horizon Report
http://www.nmc.org/horizon
W3C Semantic Web resource
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Some resources
Peter Mika, “Semantic Search Arrives at the Web” (2008)
http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/38595/0/page/1
Jason Ohler, The Semantic Web in Education
EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2008
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/TheSemanticWebinEducation/47675

SemTech list of applications
http://semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk/technology
Liberal Education Today blog
http ://blog.nitle.org/let
http://blogs.nitle.org/let/?s=semantic
NITLE
http://nitle.org

http://synthesize-specialize-mobilize.blogspot.com	24
http://www.slideshare.net	3
http://www.blogger.com	1
http://eportfolios.wikischolars.columbia.edu	1
http://synthesize-specialize-mobilize.blogspot.co.uk	1

Semantic.edu, an introduction

by Bryan Alexander on Dec 08, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

5 Embeds 30

Statistics

Semantic.edu, an introduction — Presentation Transcript