Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web or, Why Aren’t We in Hyperland Yet? Michael K. Bergman

Outline Intro to SD and Me Summary of Main Thesis A Wee Bit of History What is Not Working? Problems with Linked Data What is Working? Some Pragmatic Lessons SD’s Pragmatic Approach Conclusion and Q & A 2

Structured Dynamics Founded 2008; predecessor Zitgist LLC; two principals Privately held, revenue funded Boutique semantic technology shop Services and consulting:  Semantic enterprise adoption  Ontology development and mapping  Tech transfer and training Development and software:  Open source OSF stack  Data conversion and migration  Client-specific development 3

Current Products and OSF Stack the pivotal product; Web services middleware that provides distributed data access and federation Drupal-based structured data linkage to structWSF spreadsheet, JSON and XML authoring and conversion framework reference set of linking subjects and basis for domain vocabularies an ontology- and entity-driven information extraction and tagging system 4

SD Locations 5

Michael Bergman 6

Summary of Main Thesis

Main Arguments Not against linked data  Proponent and explicator since 2006 But, linked data burdensome, not pivotal to interoperability Interoperability requires:  Structured data (from any source)  Canonical data model (RDF)  (Relatively simple) ontologies for world views, schema  Curation 8

A Wee Bit of History

Key Historical Milestones 1945: Memex 1963: Hypertext 1990: Hyperland 2001: Semantic Web  Lack of uptake 2006: Linked Data 2010: Revisionist Linked Data 10

Hyperland 11

Linked Data “Linked Data is a set of best practices for publishing and deploying instance and class data using the RDF data model, naming the data objects using uniform resource identifiers (URIs), thereby exposing the data for access via the HTTP protocol, while emphasizing data interconnections, interrelationships and context useful to both humans and machine agents.” 12

What is Not Working?

Some Disappointments to Date Full semantic Web vision Widescale adoption of the semantic Web, linked data Lack of intelligent agents Many aspects of the practice of linked data 14

Problems with Linked Data

Problems with Linked Data Burdensome on publishers Naïve linkages:  Overuse of sameAs  Lack of accurate alignments (Often) poor data quality Wrong focus 16

Some Conditions for Interoperability<Interoperability> <needsMapping> <Predicates> <Interoperability> <needsReference> <Nouns> 17

Many Mappings Should be Approximate skos:broadMatch skos:related ore:similarTo umbel:isAbout vmf:isInVocabulary skos:closeMatch lvont:nearlySameAs umbel:isLike umbel:hasCharacteristic lvont:somewhatSameAs rdfs:seeAlso ore:describes map:narrowerThan skos:narrower map:broaderThan skos:broader dc:subject link:uri foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf 18

What is Working?

Successes Siri Bing (Powerset) Google + schema.org (Some) linked data 20

Siri 21

Bing (Powerset) 22

Google Statistical NLP Structured results Initial schema (Metaweb) schema.org (with Yahoo, Bing and Yandex) 23

Some Linked Data Some selected knowledge bases:  DBpedia  GeoNames  Freebase (Google) Biomedical community LOD-LAM community 24

Some Pragmatic Lessons

Some Lessons Learned Structure is good in any form Keep semantic technology in the background Open Web (FYN) likely to be disappointing Ontologies essential for alignments NLP an essential contributor to structure Metadata an essential contributor to characterization, use Linked data is a burden to publishers, places semantic emphasis on wrong part of chain 26

Seven Pillars 27

Preserving Existing Assets Relational databases (RDBMs) Distributed structured assets  spreadsheets  lightweight datastores Web pages and Web sites Existing documents and text Web databases and APIs Other databases (RDF, OO, etc.) 28

irON Dataset Exchange Framework Simple authoring and dataset creation irON includes an abstract notation and vocabulary for instance records Notations for:  Instance records  Schema  Datasets and metadata  Linkages to other schema Serializations available for:  XML (irXML)  JSON (irJSON)  CSV/spreadsheets (commON) 29

Three irON Serializations irXML irJSON commON 30

Spreadsheet Correspondence to Triples 31

More-or-less Interchangeable Formats 32

SD’s Pragmatic Approach

A Layered Approach 34

OSF Stack 35

Conclusion

Summary If you can, do linked data; it is a GOOD THING In any event, expose your data:  Structured (use NLP for unstructured)  Metadata  Definitions  Relations (simple)  “Semsets” (synonyms, acronyms, spelling variants) Build vocabulary and ontology consortia Build trust and curation communities Semantics essential at the interoperability level, not necessarily publication or data transfer 37

Take Aways James Hendler: “A little bit of semantics goes a long way” Leverage linked data, but broaden focus Consider adopting the semantic enterprise as the broader focus 38

Further Information

More Info and Links Open Semantic Framework (OSF) stack:  http://openstructs.org TechWiki (400 detailed OSF how-to articles):  http://techwiki.openstructs.org Key ontologies:  UMBEL: http://umbel.org  BIBO: http://bibliontology.org Blogs:  Mike Bergman: http://mkbergman.com  Fred Giasson: http://fgiasson.com/blog Structured Dynamics:  http://structureddynamics.com  http://citizen-dan.org (community indicator systems) 40

http://www.mkbergman.com	2908
http://127.0.0.1	6
http://feeds.feedburner.com	3
http://www.bonvote.com	2
http://bestersoft.ru	1
http://www.mkbergman.org	1
http://www.michaelbergman.com	1
http://www.newsblur.com	1

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

by Mike Bergman

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

8 Embeds 2,923

Statistics

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web Presentation Transcript