Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Semantic Web Workshop at HP Labs Bristol

Today I attended the Semantic Web Workshop at HP Labs Bristol. The HP Labs in Bristol, UK are HP's second largest research facility in the World, and one of the largest computing research facility in Europe. The Labs focuses on many different core technologies which include Quantum Information Processing, location based wireless services, semantic web, agent-based computing, privacy and identity management and mobile health care.

So what is "semantic web", most basically it is a set of technologies which aims at making information on the web (which is predominantly human oriented) machine readable. Allowing users to express ontologies and models to make machines and software do the reasoning instead of humans. Semantic applications could for example find patterns of symptoms for a specific disease or they can allow you to find the nearest doctor via a simple search on the internet. For Semantic Web to work, people need to define data about the data, "metadata", in order for machine to process it according to some model. This metadata is usually defined in Resource Description Language (RDF) or in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which as is claimed by many as more expressive than the more popular RDF. Just as there is SQL to query a Database, there are query languages to query metadata which enables reasoning on the actual data. A popular Query language is SPARQL (pronounced Sparkle), and sure enough this language was designed in HP Labs Bristol. So the building pieces of semantic web are in place, but where are the applications?

For a layman progress on semantic web seems to be going very slow, infact most of the the Web2.0 has nothing to do with Semantic Web, which was seen as the next generation Web. However there are semantic web software all over the place at the backend. At the workshop it was revealed that companies such as Amazon and Google had deployed semantic web technologies and keeping their platform proprietary for competitive advantage. Semantic web technologies exist however they don't exist in such a framework which people can use.

One of the prime projects in HP Labs Bristol, is Jena. Jena is an open source semantic web framework, one of the first of its kind. At the workshop some few more were introduced: Talis, an easy to use framework to develop semantic web applications then there is an effort by Ingent Publishing Cooperation etc.

Many applications were presented in the workshop, which really showed off the capabilities of the Semantic Web. The focus of the Semantic Web community currently seems to be to create user friendly frameworks/development environments where users can develop semantic web applications. Just as there is DreamWeaver/Frontpage/Expression which helps us develop Web applications, similar frameworks are required for the next generation of Web applications.

Overall it was an informative event, especially for me who wasn't versed with Semantic web technologies before.

Me in front of Building 3, HP Labs, and beneath is the main building of the complex