TechnicaLee Speaking

At SemTech a couple of weeks ago, I participated in the jam-packed lightning talk session, 90 minutes packed with 5-minute talks and moderated with great aplomb by Paul Miller. While most of the speakers presented pithy, informative, and witty slide decks, I opted to go a different route: I've long believed that some of the biggest value in Semantic Web technologies lies in their ability to dramatically change the timescales involved in traditional IT projects—to this end, I used my 5 minute slot to give a live demo of using our Anzo software suite to build a solution for running a conference such as SemTech using just Excel and a Web browser.

When I got back to Boston, I made a recording of the same lightning demo for posterity. Please enjoy it here and drop me a note if you have any questions or would like to learn more.

(Best viewed in full screen, 720p.)

Posted by Lee Feigenbaum at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The SPARQL Working Group is still working on all of our specifications. None are yet at Last Call, though we feel our designs are quite stable  and we're hoping to reach Last Call within a few months. Standard W3C process encourages interested community members to review Working Drafts as they're produced, but especially encourages reviews of Last Call drafts.

While we will of course do this (solicit as widespread review of our Last Call drafts as possible), I'd like to put out a call for reviews of our current set of Working Drafts. If you can only do one review, you're probably best off waiting for Last Call; but if you have the inclination and time, it would be great to receive reviews of our current set of Working Drafts at our comments list at public-rdf-dawg-comments@w3.org. The Working Group has committed to responding formally to all comments received from hereon out.

Here is our current set of documents, along with a few explicit areas/issues that the Working Group and editors would love to receive feedback about (of course, all reviews & all feedback is welcome):

SPARQL 1.1 Query

• Feedback on MINUS and NOT EXISTS, the two new negation constructs in SPARQL 1.1 (section 8)
• Feedback on the new functions in SPARQL 1.1 (15.4.14 through 15.4.21)
• Feedback on the aggregates ("set functions") included in SPARQL 1.1 (section 10.2.1)
• Feedback on property paths (currently in its own document)

SPARQL 1.1 Update

• Handling of RDF datasets in SPARQL Update (particularly the WITH, USING, and USING NAMED clauses)

SPARQL 1.1 Service Description

• Discovery mechanism for service descriptions (section 2)
• Modeling of graphs and RDF datasets (3.2.7 through 3.2.10 and 3.4.11 through 3.4.17)
• Service description as related to entailment (3.2.5, 3.2.6 and 3.4.3 through 3.4.5)

SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes

• The mechanisms for restricting solutions in all regimes
• Are the OWL Direct Semantics too general? E.g. it allows for variables in complex class expressions

SPARQL 1.1 Federation Extensions

• Should support for SERVICE be mandatory in SPARQL 1.1 Query implementations?
• Should support for BINDINGS be mandatory in SPARQL 1.1 Query implementations?

SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs

• Interpretation/translation of HTTP verbs into SPARQL Update statements
• Handling of indirect graph identification (section 4.2 et al.)

Posted by Lee Feigenbaum at 1:59 PM | Permalink