Cwm 1.0 has been released. Cwm is a general-purpose data processor for the semantic web, implemented as a forward chaining reasoner which can be used for querying, checking, transforming and filtering information. Its core language is RDF, extended to include rules, and it uses RDF/XML or RDF/N3 serializations.

Swoogle is experimenting with a new interface that searches for semantic web documents using terms whose local names contain certain substrings. This seems to provide a good way to find documents about a given topic. For example, to find ontologies about time, you might search for documents using terms matching before after time instant. For efficiency reasons, we are not matching on a substring, but rather decompose the local name into one or more lexemes. For example, the local name BeliefConnective is decomposed into {belief connective}. You can, of course, still search using substrings, but queries contaning such constraints can be expensive.

The Manufacturer, a magazine for manufacuring industries (surprise!),
has an article A question of semantics on the role of the semantic web in facilitating supply chain integration. It menations PSL and has some nice quotes from NIST’s Steve Ray, including

“I believe the big trend right now in terms of integration of business systems is the movement toward the semantic Web,” says Steven Ray, division chief for the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division (MSID), a division within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “The semantic web gives meaning to information—it makes that information formal and acceptable to a computerized system to allow truly intelligent searching.”

del.icio.us is an interesting idea and worth a look. After registering, it allows you to bookmark a web page and assign it a set of arbitrary keyword tags (e.g., tag Swoogle with ’searchEngine semanticWeb owl rdf ontology’). It is a ’social bookmarks manager’ in that you can share your bookmarks with other users and see and search over the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, the tags they use and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

Xiaocheng Luan’s Ph.D. disseration on a quantitative approach to matching service requests against capability descriptions is now available on line.

Xiaocheng Luan, Adaptive Middle Agent for Service Matching in the Semantic Web: A Quantitative Approach, Ph.D. dissertation, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, November 01, 2004.

In Dr. Luan’s approach, middle agents establish and refine an agent’s capability model based on the domain ontology and through the interactions with the agents. An agent’s performance history is considered as an integral part of the agent’s capability model and the agent’s strong and weak areas can also be revealed. The dynamically captured and updated service distribution in the service domain is considered as an important factor in service matching. Service matching here is carried out in two steps. In the first step, candidates are selected through the semantic service description matching. In the second step, the performance rating of each candidate with respect to the specific request is estimated based on the agent’s capability model, and the candidates with the highest estimated performance ratings will be selected. Statistics collected from evaluation experiments show a significant improvement over typical service matching methods in terms of the accuracy in selecting the best service provider(s) for each request.