The last two days I was one of a few people who had the great pleasure to enjoy the very informative conference about the Semantic Web (aka. Web 2.0/3.0, aka. the Giant Global Graph) in Vienna, Austria: the “Web of Data Practicioners Days”.

Many different point of views, development status of different semantic applications and best of all - available implementations around the topic Semantic Web were presented. The mix of information from introductory details for beginners like myself to insights for pros and senior programmers was perfect.

If you are looking for an in-depth explanation of the Semantic Web I would like to point you to the Semantic Web wikipedia article. There you will find basic information and further links. If you are looking for photos of the conference you will be served at flickr.com when searching for “wodpd2008″.

The possibilities of the Semantic Web are simply incredible and I am truly impressed by the current status of the development. It is quite shocking that so little information is spread publicly on prominent places. One thing which caught high attention at the conference is for example the inclusion of a semantic framework offering semantic functionality in KDE 4.0 (Nepomuk). Another really nice implementation was the semantically enhanced Wiki of the Semantic Web Company. The semantic Wiki eliminates a lot of maintenance tasks as it queries the semantic connections dynamically and displays the generated lists in an automatic fashion.

It is interesting to see that there are semantic initiatives from many different directions. There is the main movement of porting existing data from the current data silos into open semantic structures. Then there are industries which probably do not even know that they are supporting the evolution of semantic data relations. For example there are the first devices with integrated GPS capabilities (cameras, mobile phones) which store the exact geo-location into the image EXIF metadata (additionally to all sorts of other data like timestamp, camera settings, etc.). This addition of longitude and latitude values is a big step forward as it allows to relate the image to a location on this planet. Which allows endless more relations to information about the location probably also in accordance to the timestamp. And then there are some companies already investing big into semantic technology by creating products and services of the future. Of course in a closed way at the moment but at least they are also contributing to the further development and sooner or later all the data will be interlinked anyway as this is the real power of the semantic web.

From my point of view of a PHP application developer I am glad to report that there are many useful toolkits, frameworks, plugins in addition to existing and widespread PHP projects (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) are already available. If you want to get your locked-in data out there in RDF you might want to take a closer look at Triplify. Of course they already offer a wordpress configuration.

Wordpress users also might want to install the tagaroo plugin which is basically a plugin demonstrating a real life implementation of a semantic web service offering additional benefit for bloggers. It is based on the Open Calais Webservice which is an online service which analyzes submitted text and allows for integrating semantic funcationality for any kind of application. Tagaroo submits your blog entry which gets analyzed and suggests tags which would fit your blog entry and on top of that you also get flickr images for inclusion which might match the suggested tags as well.

I could go on and on but I will stop here with just a few more pointers: dbpedia, dbtune, microformats, firefox gnosis extension, firefox tabulator extension, open calais

Some of the lecturers were Danny Ayers, Alan Dix, Leo Sauermann, Sören Auer, Yves Raimond, Brian Davis

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 23:01 and is filed under technology and has 32 views. The entry is tagged with php, semantic applications, semantic web, web 3.0, web service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.