beckr.org | Christian Becker » Semantic Web

Marbles released on SourceForge

cbecker — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:47:59 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of Marbles on SourceForge.

Marbles is a server-side application that formats Semantic Web content for XHTML clients using Fresnel lenses and formats. Colored dots are used to correlate the origin of displayed data with a list of data sources, hence the name.
By performing all formatting, data retrieval and storage activities on the server side rather than on a potentially thinly equipped client, the view generation can touch on large amounts of data and requests can be answered relatively quickly. Marbles provides display and database capabilities for DBpedia Mobile.

Data is retrieved from multiple sources and integrated into a single graph that is persisted across user sessions. When provided with the URI of a resource to display, Marbles tries to dereference it. In parallel, it queries Sindice and Falcons for datasources that contain information about the given resource, and Revyu for reviews. In a similar manner as the Semantic Web Client Library, Marbles follows specific predicates found in retrieved data such as owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso in order to gain more information about a resource and to obtain human-friendly resource labels.

Thanks to Eli Lilly and Company for supporting the open-sourcing of Marbles in part by a research grant.

DBpedia Mobile and Marbles featured in Semantic Web for Dummies

cbecker — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:18:39 +0000

The Semantic Web is so mainstream now: Oracle’s Jeff Pollock has actually published a Semantic Web for Dummies book – and it has a whopping 2 pages on DBpedia and DBpedia Mobile! Kudos for what looks like a much-needed overview.

BBC interlinks with DBpedia

cbecker — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:50:06 +0000

The BBC is starting to embrace the Semantic Web. We were recently commissioned to create links between DBpedia and an internal BBC vocabulary, which enable the BBC to use DBpedia/Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary. This allows them to suggest related content to their users across their multitude of content management systems (we hear there are 36 systems in use at the moment) and better integrate content from the web into their properties. This also means that third parties will gain access to BBC metadata and content in the very near future. Skeptics beware, this is reaching a tipping point!

Talking About Interfaces to the Semantic Web

cbecker — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:42:47 +0000

I recently had a guest appearance at the Semantic Web Gang podcast. Together with MIT’s David Karger and the regular “gang members”, we discussed interfaces to the Semantic Web. The discussion was really intense at points as the participants had very differentiated standpoints.
It was largely agreed that visualization is a key factor to show the benefits of the Semantic Web and to foster industry adoption. Some key discussions: Should we worry about applications first, or step back and consider visualization at this early stage? How many forms of visualizations are there for one ‘thing’? Who builds them? Where do you get data from? Should users worry about that? How are queries expressed?
The participants also agreed that there will be an industry of people that build visualization widgets for specific things, which I thought is a really interesting scenario.
I talked a bit about Marbles and DBpedia Mobile and pleaded for open environments where data published by anyone can be taken into account. (Podcast)