spin

Is SPIN the Schematron of RDF?

Represent business rules using an implemented standard, then flagging violations in a machine-readable way.

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…

A rules language for RDF

Right under our noses.

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…