Facebook’s OpenGraph, Google’s Rich Snippets, BestBuy’s use of the GoodRelations vocabulary and other recent events are boosting RDFa’s popularity for storing machine-readable data in web pages. There are several tools and programming libraries available (not to mention built-in features of development platforms such as TopQuadrant’s TopBraid Suite for application development) that let you extract the RDF triples from this RDFa markup and use it, but I recently…

OK, it’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer: we can attach metadata to class and property declarations, so when we know that a given instance is a member of a particular class and has certain properties, if those are declared, we know more about the instance and can do more with it, not least of all aggregate it more easily with other data that uses the same or related classes and properties.

Christian Fürber and Martin Hepp (the latter being the source of the increasingly popular GoodRelations ontology) have published a paper titled “Using SPARQL and SPIN for Data Quality Management on the Semantic Web” (pdf) for the 2010 Business Informations Systems conference in Berlin. TopQuadrant’s Holger Knublach designed SPIN, or the SPARQL Inferencing Notation, as a SPARQL-based way to express constraints and inferencing rules on sets of triples, and Fürber and Hepp have…

I’ve played with finance.yahoo.com’s feed of CSV stock ticker data before and recently had an idea that was so simple that I’m surprised that no one’s done it before: why not write a script that passes along a request for this data but converts the result to RDF before returning it? So I did.

When most people want to take notes on a collection of things, and they know that the notes will have some structure but they’re not sure about the nature of that structure just yet, they use a spreadsheet. For each thing that they take notes on, they add a new row; for each attribute of the things under review, they add a column. From an investment banker comparing potential investments to a scout leader planning a camping trip, the grid makes it easy for you to compare similar attributes…

Last May, in Adding semantics to make data more valuable: the secret revealed, I showed how storing a little bit of semantics about the word “spouse”—the fact that it’s a symmetric property (that is, that if A is the spouse of B, then B is the spouse of A)—let me look up someone’s home phone number in my address book even if my entry for him there lacks his home phone number. I like this story because unlike biotech and some of the other popular domains for Semantic Web…

Last week was my first week working at TopQuadrant, and I spent three days in a class given by one of my new co-workers, Scott Henninger. I only had a skeletal idea of what the components of TopBraid Suite did before, and now that I have a better idea, I’m very impressed. (I may be wrong on one or two details below, but I’m still the new guy.)

Yahoo! SearchMonkey is one of those interesting, RDF-related technologies that I’d been meaning to check out for a while, and when I saw how much of the reaction to Google’s Rich Snippets was people like Ryan Smith or Peter Mika in the May Semantic Web Gang podcast saying that Google was just doing what SearchMonkey had already done, I knew that it was time to look more closely at SearchMonkey.