UMBC alumnus Joab Jackson has an article in Government Computer News, Tim Berners-Lee: Machine-readable Web still a ways off, reporting on the International Semantic Web Conference help outside of Washington DC at the end of October. The article uses data.gov to illustrate the challenges and opportunities for the Semantic Web. Data.gov is a site whose purpose “is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.”

Jackson quotes Tim Berners-Lee

“When you look at putting government data on the Web, one of the concerns is … to not just put it out there on Excel files on Data.gov,” he said. “You should put these things in” the Resource Description Framework.

and later describes a project at RPI to republish information from data.gov in RDF leaded by another UMBC alumnus, Li Ding.

“Our goal is to make the whole thing shareable and replicable for others to re-use,” said project researcher Li Ding. By rendering data into RDF, it can be more easily interposed with other sets of data to create entirely new datasets and visualizations, Ding said. He showed a Google Map-based graphic that interposed RDF-versions of two different data sources from the Environmental Protection Agency, originally rendered in CSV files.

Here is the video of the talk that Tim Berners-Lee gave at the TED2009 conference on linked data.

You can see the slides that TBL used on the W3C site.

I may have missed it, but I don’t think he mentioned the phrase “Semantic Web” once during the 16 minute talk.

Thompson Reuters announced on their blog (Life in the Linked Data Cloud: Calais Release 4) that their next release of the Calais web-based information extraction services will support linked data.

“In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.”

The new capabilities will be available in release 4 that is expected
out on 09 January 2009.

The change is based on Calais returning de-referenceable URIs for the entities it finds. Accessing those URIs will produce RDF with links to corresponding entities in DBpedia, Freebase and other sources of “Semantic Web” data. It will be very interesting to see how well their system does at mapping document entities (e.g., “secretary Rice”) to entities in the LOD cloud such as http://dbpedia.org/resource/Condoleezza_Rice. Accessing that URI with a request for content type application/rdf+xml returns the RDF at http://dbpedia.org/data/Condoleezza_Rice that has RDF assertions extracted by DBpedia from Wikipedia.