TechnicaLee Speaking

I’ll be presenting an introduction to SPARQL Webcast this coming Tuesday at 1pm EST. The Webcast is the 4th in a free series hosted by the fine folks at Semantic Universe. In this one hour session, I’ll be using real queries that work against real data on the Web to teach the nuts and bolts of SPARQL, the Semantic Web query language. I’ve given this particular tutorial a few times before, and it’s a fun one to give—and I’ve gotten positive feedback in the past. Semantic Universe archives the sessions online, as well, so if you can’t make it on Tuesday, please check back later.

What: SPARQL By Example Webcast
When: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, at 1pm EST
Who: Anyone interested in an introduction to SPARQL driven completely by real examples
How: Register and then attend via Webcast

Ever since we first showed Anzo for Excel at SemTech in May, we've had a blast talking with tons of people and discussing how a semantics-based approach to Excel might address many longstanding spreadsheet challenges facing organizations big and small alike. The technology continues to improve dramatically from week to week, and we're looking forward to a first general release of a productized Anzo for Excel at the end of this year.

We've recently put together a short (5 min.) video showing many of the capabilities of Anzo for Excel in the context of an ad-hoc project planning scenario:

Anzo for Excel: Spreadsheets for enterprise data management

As an added bonus, Jordi also put together a short video showing how Anzo for Excel along with our Anzo on the Web can allow you to expose, share, and publish spreadsheet data on the Web with just a few clicks, while simultaneously taking advantage of powerful faceted browsing capabilities (a la Exhibit) and custom visualizations:

Anzo for Excel: EPA Fuel Demonstration

We're actively engaging with partners and customers in exploring and building out use cases, demos, and projects leveraging Anzo for Excel. Drop me a line if you're interested in seeing/learning more.

David Provost has announced the completion and release of his report, On the Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry. Cambridge Semantics was pleased to be a part of the report, which we think is a valuable contribution to the growing industry. David features profiles of 17 Semantic Web product-oriented vendors and deploying companies. David's conclusions include:

The Semantic Web industry is alive, well, and it’s increasingly competitive as a commercial technology. At this point, there are too many success stories and too much money being invested to dismiss the technology as non-viable.  The Semantic Web is presently building a track record, which means the big wins and unanticipated uses are yet to come. In the meantime, adoption is occurring, and the early news is very good indeed.

Enjoy.

I've been keeping an eye on the things people are saying about SPARQL and how SPARQL is being used ever since we published the W3C SPARQL Recommendations back in January. Of course, SPARQL has been around for much longer than half a year (as noted, for example, by Deepak Singh who "hadn’t even realized that [SPARQL] was in draft status"). Here's a summary of some of the more interesting or noteworthy ones. Please share any of your favorites in the comments!

Upon announcing SPARQL

• The requisite (?) Slashdot thread
• Headlines summarizing the announcement included "W3C adds a touch of Sparql to Web 2.0", "Semantic Web takes big step forward", "Adding Some SPARQL to the Semantic Web"

Positive Impressions

• Sometimes I doubt your commitment to SPARQL Motion - wherein the author greets SPARQL with "Freakin yay!" and awaits the day that SPARQL "help[s] us get better porn faster, which is of course the benchmark of all new advancements in technology."
• "SPARQL takes us one step closer to the idea of software being something that users create rather than something users use."
• "However, HTML 5 may not be the most important recent standards announcement that the W3C has made."
• "SPARQL is the glue that makes this global data mesh usable, and it was just ratified this year.  The Web's voice just cracked."

Negative Impressions

• Unhappy With SPARQL - unsatisfied with the verbose syntax, the lack of arbitrary selectable expressions, and the ASK query form
• Have you heard of SPARQL? - worries that SPARQL queries are so targeted as to miss accidental discovery of interesting information and that this might be a new technology burden for small Web site developers
• The problems of SPARQL - enumerates three problems touching on the RDF data model's complexity, SPARQL's relative anonymity (compared to SQL), and a perceived lack of expressivity

Explanatory/tutorial Writings

• Bee Node: A FOAF Tale - Leigh Dodds's whimsical exploration of common SPARQL patterns. (The deconstructed version.)
• RIP Arnie Humour - SPARQL and The Terminator, together again for the first time

• Understanding SPARQL - A tutorial by Andrew Matthews on IBM developerWorks that teaches SPARQL "through the example of a team tracking and journaling system for a virtual company."
• Introduzione al Web Semantico - OK, this Italian tutorial Simone Onofri only has a few slides on SPARQL, but slide 48 (introducing SPARQL) is so beautiful that I wanted to include this anyway.
• Why SPARQL? - From yours truly.

Using SPARQL

• Dan Brickley has a large collection of SPARQL-related writings, including these topics: dynamic FOAF groups via SPARQL; UUIDs for dealing with varying views of social-graph data; visual SPARQL query tools; SPARQL over XMPP (Jabber)
• Henry Story uses SPARQL to find international calling codes
• Arto Bendiken reports on Dries Buytaert's keynote at Drupalcon Boston envisioning a SPARQL-enabled Drupal 7.x release

Miscellaneous

• Summary of the SPARQL BoF at WWW2008 - discussion of various SPARQL extension features
• SP2Bench: A SPARQL Performance Benchmark - Based on DBLP-style generated data sets
• Volunteer recruitment for RDF store project on Hadoop - Not strictly SPARQL, but will include a SPARQL implementation on top of a Hadoop + Hbase + MapReduce system

Of course, the past six months have also seen plenty of new Linked Data deployments (often with accompanying SPARQL endpoints) as well as a bevy of new implementations, and enhancements and upgrades to existing implementations. And SPARQL continues to be used as the data-access bedrock of Semantic Web applications. All in all, the future looks bright--some might even say it SPARQLs.

We're continuing to work feverishly at Cambridge Semantics, and one of the main focal points of our efforts is the upcoming (later this year) release of Open Anzo 3.0. In February I wrote a bit about the core client APIs that we've stabilized for this release. Today, I wanted to share a huge development-productivity aid that uses the Anzo.java client implementation: a feature-rich command-line client.

Joe Betz, who added and announced the new command line interface a few weeks ago, also wrote an excellent guide to getting setup and using the client. I heartily recommend the guide, but to whet your appetite, here's an example interaction with the CLI client. (This interaction occurs after the install and configuring of default settings for the client, as given in the guide. It also assumes a running Anzo server (as per the "Quick Start" section in the guide).)

I'll be heading to SemTech this weekend and am looking forward to meeting a lot of new people and seeing a lot of familiar, friendly faces. I'm particularly excited about the presentation that I'll be giving on Wednesday morning. In conjunction with Brand NIemann of the U.S. EPA, I'll be demonstrating some of the work that Cambridge Semantics has been doing to work with spreadsheets as a first-class source of semantic data. Our team has done a fantastic job building a user experience that's tightly integrated into Excel, and in doing so has provided a very easy way to free information from the confines of the spreadsheet.

I'm going to show a few different scenarios that involve linking data between different spreadsheets, reusing spreadsheet data on the Web, keeping live data updated in real-time, and more. Much of the presentation and demonstration is in the context of the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract, and I'll also be showing how the same software can be applied to conference data from SemTech itself.

If you're planning to be at SemTech next week, please drop me a note so that I can come and say hi there. And if you are there, please come and see my presentation:

Title: Getting to Web Semantics for Spreadsheets in the U.S. Government
Day: Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Time: 08:30 AM - 09:30 AM

I blogged previously about my experience co-authoring an article on the Semantic Web for Scientific American. Since then, Scientific American has granted me permission to publish the text of the article on my Web site. So please feel free to enjoy the article and share it with others: "The Semantic Web In Action"

A few notes:

• The default view of the article breaks it into multiple pages to make it more easily digestible and bookmarkable. There is a link at the top and bottom to a single-page version suitable for printing and reading offline. Or if you just happen to prefer reading it like that.
• The article text is followed by the text of the article's sidebars. There are links back and forth between the main text and the relevant sidebars. Most of the sidebars in the article included artwork which I do not have permission to reproduce online at this time.
• At the end of the article I've gathered links to the various companies, projects, and technologies referenced in the article. (The terms of the reproduction rights from Scientific American prohibit adding links within the main content of the article.)

Please let me know what you think. Also, if you have any trouble reading or printing the article, let me know as well. (I whipped together some JavaScript to do the pagination while maintaining the browser's back button and internal anchors and things like that, so there may be some bugs. I'll write more about the JavaScript some other time.)

I realized that I hadn't blogged a pointer to the compilation of SPARQL extensions that I've created on the ESW wiki. Quoting myself:

Over the DAWG's lifetime (and since publication of the SPARQL Recommendations in January), there have been many important features that have been discussed but did not get included in the SPARQL specifications. I -- and many others -- hope that many of these topics will be addressed by a future working group, though there are no concrete plans for such a group at this time.

In the interest of cataloging these extensions and encouraging SPARQL developers to seek interoperable implementations of SPARQL extensions, I've created:

   http://esw.w3.org/topic/SPARQL/Extensions

That page links to individual pages for (currently) 13 categories of SPARQL extensions. Each of those pages, in turn, discusses the relevant type of SPARQL extension and attempts to provide links to research, discussion, and implementations of the extension.

I also plan to use this list to help encourage user- and implementor-driven discussion of these extensions over the coming months. Again, the goal is to allow SPARQL users to make known what features are most important to them and also to allow implementations to seek common syntaxes and semantics for SPARQL extensions. (All of this, in the end, should help a future working group charter a new version of SPARQL and produce a specification that allows for interoperable SPARQL v2 implementations.)

It's a wiki. Please add references that are not there, new topics, or discussions of existing topics. (I've tried to reuse existing ESW Wiki pages for some topics that already had discussion.)

Where I say "this list" above, I mean public-sparql-dev@w3.org. Please subscribe if you're interested in discussing any or all of these potential SPARQL extensions.