Foaf is a well-known semantic web practice on the Web, and we know that there are millions of FOAF instances on the Web. A scutter can help use to recursively find foaf documents online using hyperlinks in foaf documents; however, how to obtain the initial seeds is still a big issue.

In addition, many semantic web users would like to find out the population of ontology, e.g. the instances of a defined class such as foaf:Person, or where foaf:email has been populated as predicate.

Therefore, Swoogle provide an interesting interface supporting finding instances of a class such as foaf:Person.

This swoogle query searches the usage of a semantic web term, foaf:Person.

Meaning?
Its result consists of six exclusive categories:

• definesClass: the term has been defined as a class in the ontology
• definesProperty: the term has been defined as a property in the ontology
• populatesClass: there is a class-instance of that term in the document
• populatesProperty: the term has been used as a predicate (i.e. populated) in the document
• usesClass: the term has been used (neither defined or populated) as a class in an document. e.g. when an ontology asserts myns:Person rdfs:subClassOf foaf:Person.
• usesProperty: the term has been used as a property

Note that a document might have multiple usage relation with a term, e.g. a document both defines a term as a class, uses it to define other classes and properties, and populates its class-instances.

How to get there
In order to access that page, please follow the following steps:

1. start from swoogle home page, choose “search term”
2. type the localname or the entire URI surrounded by double qoute, and move to search result page
3. click “metadata” link under your URI, and move to term’s metadata page
4. click “related documents” link (a grey block) on the top of the page, and move to the wanted page

NOTE: advanced users may use swoogle web service APIs to retrieve more results.

I don’t know if this report is good new or bad news and, if either, who it is good or bad for.

“The Information and Communication Ministry conducted the survey together with the National Internet Development Agency of Korea. It found that Internet use among five-year-olds surveyed was 64 percent, among four-year-olds 47 percent and among three-year-olds 34 percent. Young children on average started using the Internet at 3.2 years of age and spent on average 4.8 hours a week online. Some 93 percent of the diminutive respondents used the Internet to play games or access music, but 39 percent used the web for “study,” the survey finds.”

Maybe it’s bad for Korean preschoolers who should be playing with each other or with their Legos. Or maybe it’s bad for slothful preschoolers everywhere else who will end up working for the Koreans when they grow up. I guess it’s good for the Internet, unless the preschoolers all start blogs.

[spotted on Smart Mobs]

We’ve set up a Google group, Swooglers, for users of the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine. Anyone can browse the archived and join, but only members can post messages. Replies are sent to the whole group. We’re not exactly sure what Swooglers will have to talk about, but it might be a place to share your experiences in using Swoogle, ask other users for advice, etc.

If you go to Swoogle on this Groundhog’s Day you will see a change. We’ve released a new version, Swoogle 2006, that is a nearly complete rewrite of Swoogle Classic, which now answers to Swoogle 2005. While Swoogle is currently missing some of Swoogle 2005′s features, it enjoys a cleaner and simpler model and foundation. We will be adding in some of these features as well as new ones over the next few months. Here are some of Swoogle 2006′s highlights:

• New hardware. Swoogle 2006 is running on a set of three machines: EB2 is a two processor Sun v20z with 4G of memory and runs the crawler, DBMS and development web interfaces; LOGOS is an IBM eserver runs the production web interfaces, and NATRAJ is the file server for the SW cache and archive.
• More data. Swoogle 2006 has over 850K documents in its index compared to Swoogle 2005′s 340K. The documents include about 700K RDF documents and 140K HTML documents with embedded RDF.
• Better ranking. Swoogle 2006 uses the improved ranking algorithms reported on in our ISWC 2005 paper.
• Better crawling. Swoogle 2006 now does a better job of crawling new URLs, including those submitted by people.
• Web services. Swoogle 2006 exposes a set of 17 web services, currently with simple GCI interfaces that return their results as RDF graph. Using the web services requires the use of a key, so we can track usage and possible abuses.
• RDF output. All query results, whether via a web service call or through the browser interface, are available in RDF. For browser-based queries, look for the RDF VERSION link in the upper left corner of the page.
• Simpler interface. The human web interface is simpler and cleaner.
• Cache and archive. Swoogle 2006 maintains a cache of the SW documents it finds and also keeps copies of older versions in it’s Semantic Web Archive .
• Registered user services. Swoogle 2006 has a better system for user accounts that includes a CAPCHA to keep out spambots. Anonymous users only see a limited number of query results where as registered users can see them all.
• Development wiki. We have a wiki for swoogle development ideas and discussion.

Some of the Swoogle 2005 features currently missing from Swoogle 2006 are the shopping cart and triple shop; the ontology dictionary; swoogle statistics and swoogle’s top ten. We plan to add these back into Swoogle 2006 over the next few months. Send any comments to swoogle-developers at ebiquity.umbc.edu.

The W3C’s RDF-in-HTML task force has been wrestling with the problem developing recommended ways to embed RDF content in XHTML documents. I think that this is incredibly important as many of the use cases for the Semantic Web can benefit from documents that have both human and machine readable portions. RDF-in-HTML is actually a joint task force of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment and HTML Working Groups. Last week, the task force released a new version of the primer on RDF/A, is a set of attributes used to embed RDF in XHTML. It’s a good document to read to get an idea of how this will work.