Google’s Webmasters blog has a post on rich snippets and structured data. While this is from Google, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a very similar approach.

Snippets are “the few lines of text that appear under every search result” that are designed to “give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.” The post points out that the search engine needs to understand the content on a page in order to produce the snippets.

“The snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range; the snippet for a recipe page might show the total preparation time, a photo, and the recipe’s review rating; and the snippet for a music album could list songs along with a link to play each song.

You can help search engines understand key information in the content by adding structured data in several formats (Google looks for Microdata (preferred), Microformats and RDFa) and for a small set of topics. These topics are those covered by schema.org: Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and organizations, Recipes, Events and Music.

See the full post for details and links.

Wikidata is a new project that “aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.” The project was started by the German chapter of Wikimedia, the organization that oversees Wikipedia and related projects, and is he first new Wikimedia project since 2006.

Wikidata has its roots in the successful Semantic MediaWiki project, and the Wikidata development team is lead by Dr. Denny Vrandecic, a well known member of the Semantic Web research community and one of the Semantic MediaWiki creators in 2005. The project is funded by Paul Allen’s AI² foundation (which funded Semantic MediaWiki), Google, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Wikidata will expose the data that underlies Wikipedia and other sources as RDF and JSON and also allow people and programs to query the data as well as adding or editing data.

For more information, see an Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing on Techcrunch or the Wikimedia press release on Wikidata. You an also see a recent Wikidata presentation by Denny and view his talk on the nascent Project at the 2011 Wikimania conference.

Wikimedia fans in our area will find it easy to attend Wikimania 2012, which will be held July 12-15 at George Washington University in the Washington DC area.

The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati has an article (Google Gives Search a Refresh) and blog post (What Google’s Search Changes Might Mean for You) on upcoming changes Google to its search engine to exploit semantic data.

“Google is undergoing a major, long-term overhaul of its search-engine, using what’s called semantic Web search to enhance the current system in the coming years. The move, starting over the next few months, will impact the way people can use the search engine as well as how the search engine examines sites across the Web before ranking them in search results.
…
A Google spokesman said the company wouldn’t comment on future search-engine features. But people familiar with the initiative say that Google users will able to browse through the company’s “knowledge graph,” or its ever-expanding database of information about “entities”—people, places and things—the “attributes” of those entities and how different entities are connected to one another.
…
Some open standards come from the W3C Semantic Web and Schema.org, which the major search engine players including Google have agreed to recognize, Cornett said.

Link Data is a nicely done Web site to help people produce RDF data from simple excel spreadsheets. It appears to be the work of researchers at the RIKEN BASE group at the RIKEN Yokohama Institute in Japan. The approach is straightforward and consists of three steps: creating a template, downloading it as an excel spreadsheet and adding your data, and uploading the result to the site for conversion and publishing.

In the first step, you use the site to create a template for your table, each row of which will be mapped to RDF data about a single subject. The first column of a row must represent the subject and the remaining columns its properties. After specifying the number of columns, you enter into each a string or a URI representing the property. If you enter a string (e.g., ‘employer’), the system shows some suggested URIs drawn from the OBO ontologies that you can select instead of the string. You can also specify the cell values will be literals of type date, time, integer or float.

After downloading your spreadsheet template to your computer, you will see that the metadata is embedded in the initial rows of the table. Your next task is to enter your data, either as strings or URIs, as appropriate.

The final step is to upload the spreadsheet with your data to linkData.org, provide some additional data, and have it converted to RDF and make available on the site. Along the way you can see the results via the W3C validator as serialized in RDF/XML or depicted as a graph. You can also see how your data is connected to datasets in the LOD cloud.

Here’s the result of a simple test, in which I created a data set about people, their employers and their countries of residence.

The approach is simple and has many limitations, but I liked the Web interface and workflow. We’ve done some work in this space with RDF123 and are currently working on automating the process of producing five-start linked data.

The Linked Open Vocabularies site collects metadata and statistics about the RDFS and OWL vocbularies used in the Linked Open Data cloud. It looks like an interesting and useful resource.

“Welcome to LOV, your entry point to the growing ecosystem of linked open vocabularies (RDFS or OWL ontologies) used in the Linked Data Cloud. Here you will find vocabularies listed and individually described by metadata, classified by vocabulary spaces, interlinked using the dedicated vocabulary VOAF. You will enjoy querying the LOV dataset either at vocabulary level or at element level, exploring the vocabulary content using full-text faceted search, and finding metrics about the use of vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Not finding your favourite one? Suggest a new vocabulary to add to LOV!”

The Register has an article, Cray gets graphic with big data, on Cray’s uRiKA computer that is designed for analyzing large graphs. The specialized machine uses Crays’s Threadstorm processors and is designed to support up to 8,192 processors and 512TB of shared main memory. If you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can’t afford it — starter rack costs “several hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

Cray is positioning uRiKA as a graph appliance that “complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing enterprise analytics workflow.” Most interesting to me is that it ships ships with a software suite based on open source Semantic Web technology.

“The hardware, while impressive, is not particularly useful without some software. The Urika stack is based on the Apache Jena project, which is a Java framework for building semantic web applications. SPARQL is the pattern-matching query language for graph applications, and Apache Fuseki is the SPARQL server that runs in conjunction with the Jena framework and that allows data stored in the RDF format, the special format for graph data, to be served up over the HTTP protocol.”

Congratulations to UMBC Ebiquity alumna Cynthia Parr for being selected to present at the 2012 TED conference on the Encyclopedia of Life project. Cyndy was a research professor at UMBC and worked with us on the SPIRE project. She now works for the Smithsonian Institution and is director of the EOL Species Pages Group.She gave her three minute talk last night and we look forward to seeing it when it is available online. Here’s a note from the TED blog.

Cynthia Parr takes the stage to update us on a massive TED Prize project: The Encyclopedia of Life. Perhaps a quarter of TED talks feature living organisms. Whether it’s an urgent need for conservation or a creature that can teach us something, it’s obvious that you care deeply about biodiversity. And with your help we’ve made Ed Wilson’s grand vision a reality. To build the Encyclopedia of Life we started with databases from leading museums, libraries, and science projects. We’ve brought in content from Flickr and Wikipedia and invited everyone to add text directly to EOL.

Thanks to global partners we’ve now got information in Spanish and Arabic with more languages to come. because people should be able to learn about the species they care about in their own language. And because scientists describe 15,000 new species every year, we set it up so that if they publish in an open-access journal we automatically make a new page on EOL.

Everything on EOL, even the software itself, is free to use and to re-use. As of this week, we’ve got information on almost a million species. That’s an incredible number, nearly half the species in the tree of life and it has only been five years. But we are more than just a bunch of web pages.

Our next steps are to get even more eyeballs looking at EOL working with richer, more computable data. You helped us get off the ground, and we’re gaining momentum. The next five years are going to be even more exciting.

A CNET article, W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis, says that “The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that’s even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.”

The problem is that both the Safari and Chrome browsers, and their counterparts on Android, iPhone and iPad, use the WebKit layout engine. WebKit supports many non-standard CSS features and Web developers are building sites and pages that take advantage of them.

Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the CSS Working Group, described it this way.

Not so long ago, IE6 was the over-dominant browser on the Web. Technically, the Web was full of works-only-in-IE6 web sites and the other browsers, the users were crying. IE6 is dead, this time is gone, and all browsers vendors including Microsoft itself rejoice. Gone? Not entirely… IE6 is gone, the problem is back.

WebKit, the rendering engine at the heart of Safari and Chrome, living in iPhones, iPads and Android devices, is now the over-dominant browser on the mobile Web and technically, the mobile Web is full of works-only-in-WebKit web sites while other browsers and their users are crying.

He issued a call to action that describes the steps that the web community of authors, designers and developers can take to support an open web based on standards.

UK semantic technology company True Knowledge has released Evi, a mobile app that competes with Siri.

The mobile app is available on the Android Market and on iTunes. You can pose queries to either by speaking or typing. The Android app uses Google’s ASR speech technology and the iTunes app uses Nuance.

True Knowledge has been developing a natural answering question answering system since 2007. You can query the True Knowledge online via a Web interface. Tty the following links for some examples:

• What is umbc’s address?
• How much does an elephant weigh?
• When was Barack Obama born?
• Was Barack Obama born in Kenya?
• Is the Nile river longer than the Mississippi river?
• What causes AIDS?
• Who won the academy award for best actor in 1971?
• How old is the earth?

The Evi app has a number of additional features beyond the Web-based True Knowledge QA system and these wil probably be expanded on in the months to come.

See the Technology Review story, New Virtual Helper Challenges Siri, for more information.

The Third International Workshop on the role of the Semantic Web in Provenance Management will be held in conjunction with the Ninth Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-2012) on May 27 or 28 in Heraklion, Greece. The workshop’s objectives are to explore opportunities offered by the Semantic Web technologies in the context of the management and exploitation of provenance and document the role of provenance in real-world Semantic Web applications.

The one day workshop will include presentations of full research papers, short position papers, a panel on the W3C provenance working group proposals, and demonstrations of prototypes and working systems. Submit papers and demonstration proposals by 4 March 2012.