Well, the tutorial is finally done. Yay! It went pretty well, but there is a lot that I’d like to change. However, if you’d like to see the slides, have at it!
Oh, the tutorial was videoed, so at some point, those videos will be available. Should be interesting, for some humiliating version of “interesting”.
The schedule for OWL Experiences and Directions is now up, and it looks good. Some of the papers are really very interesting, and all of them I think will contribute to good discussion.
Clark and Parsia (us!) are sponsoring it, though we’ve not given our new logo for the OWL ED website yet. I blame Kendall!
The most important session, in my mind, is toward the end of the first day, “Ongoing and Future Standardization Efforts”. Here is where we lay the groundwork of what we are going to do over the next year. For me, I hope in the next year we can reach broad, implemented consensus on SPARQL/DL and DL Safeish rules. Oh yeah, maybe get a new round of standardization going.
OWL 1.1 is proceeding apace. FaCT++ and Protege-OWL support it. Pellet and (prelim) Swoop support should be ready by OWL ED (go Evren go!). I’ve not heard from the Racer guys, but they had a bit of a head start.
In a very minorly unusual move, OWLED is rather actively soliciting demos and posters right up to the demo/poster session. In fact, if you get a one page description of your demo/poster in by Oct 20th, you still have a shot at the proceedings:
The workshop will have a session for software demos and “posters” (formal or informal) describing work in progress. All participants, even those without a paper in the program, are invited and encouraged to demo their tools and/or present a poster. Interested parties may send the organizers a one page description of the demo/poster before October 20th. Such a description is not required, but descriptions submitted prior to October 20th will be considered for inclusion in the proceedings.
So, come out!
Most people who read this weblog—all 4 of them!—are probably interested, at least a little bit, in concrete ways to get into the Semantic Web, so I thought I’d offer a list of the 5 Best Semantic Web Tools.
Note: “best” means, really, “most interesting or most ready to be thrown into production” and “tools” means, really, “tools, or libraries, or frameworks, or infrastructure pieces”.
The list is based on my experience, opinions about what matters most, and some subjective judgment about software quality, including my preference for open source software. This list isn’t even particularly objective or fair, since some of this software was written by friends and colleagues.
In short, I have a dog in this fight.
Semantic Web Framework: Sesame
I hate Java. I mean, I really really hate it. But, for good or bad, Java is the SemWeb implementation language choice, with (probably) Python a distant second. The very best soup-to-nuts Java framework for building SemWeb applications is Sesame, which is well-designed and implemented, tracks the relevant standards closely, and includes a nice spread of tools, from RDF databases, to OWL reasoners, to rule engines.
Alternatives: Redland; for the Mono/.NET crowd there’s SemWeb.
Building an OWL ontology can be a really useful thing to do, so it’s a good thing it’s not easy! Seriously, domain modeling by way of OWL ontologies is often the Right Thing to Do, but it’s often not trivial. So there are a raft of OWL editors that aim to make it easier to build OWL ontologies. (Check this weblog in the next few weeks for a post about why and when OWL makes sense. I think, in the near to medium term, OWL has a bright future as a general purpose policy language; and, thus, OWL reasoners may become general purpose policy engines.)
SWOOP is a Java app, but uses as many web browser metaphors as possible, in an attempt to make ontology development as painless as possible. It’s well-integrated with Pellet, about which more below, which it uses as its OWL reasoner. SWOOP allows you to edit ontologies, create new ones, and to do so collaboratively with others by using the the Annotea protocol—you can share ontology “change sets” over the Web to members of your development group. Which is very cool.
SWOOP also has world-class support for OWL, including species validation (what kind of logic is your ontology?), querying ontologies using RDQL, as well as one-of-a-kind ontology partioning and debugging.
(Because of the frequent claims, on places like the Slashdot Forums, that the idea of the Semantic Web requires “one big ontology”, which everyone has to conform to… Well, because this claim is just so wrong, I want to say more about SWOOP’s partitioning support. What does it mean that SWOOP can automatically partition your ontology? Well, it means that SWOOP knows algorithms for breaking apart your domain modeling into distinct models of subdomains. Throw it a giant, cross-domain ontology like NCI’s cancer ontology—which knows about everything from genes to proteins to charbroiled meat (seriously!)—and SWOOP will partition it into more manageable, equivalent ontologies (there are many devils in the details, including some ontologies that SWOOP can’t partition, but, trust me, partitioning is uber-cool). That makes reasoning over them easier, it is likely to make OWL reasoning more scalable in the future, and it also means that the Semantic Web does not require “one big ontology”.)
SWOOP’s ontology debugging and visualization tools may be even cooler than its partition magic, and I’ll try to post more about them in the near future. In repeated end-user usability tests, SWOOP’s debugging facilities have been proven to make it easier to diagnose and repair a broken ontology than to do so in an ontology editor without debugging support.
SWOOP is a must-have tool if you have to do anything with OWL.
Alternatives: Protege-2000.
Pellet, an OWL-DL reasoner written in Java, isn’t the fastest OWL reasoner, but it’s probably the fastest open source OWL reasoner and it’s certainly one of the most feature-rich OWL reasoners.
Alternatives: Cerebra, RacerPRO, FaCT++
I’ll have more to say about this category later, but this is still a wide-open space, in my mind, that the right startup could fill nicely.
Alternatives: Sesame-MySQL, 3Store, Oracle RDF, ...
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