Semantic Web
charter
semantic-web
#swig weblog
ESW
Wiki
planetrdf weblogs
This Interest Group is now closed
(see the
announcement
to the AC
for further details.)
Semantic Web Interest Group
This is the homepage of W3C's Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG),
previously known as the
RDF Interest Group
It provides a public forum to discuss the use and development of the
Semantic
Web
. See the
group's charter
for details of its role and purpose.
The Semantic Web Interest Group is designed as a forum to support
developers and users of Semantic Web technologies (
RDF
OWL
SPARQL
etc). The group in particular serves to help developers create
vocabularies and applications to support a Web data marketplace combining
harvesting, syndication, metadata and Web Service techniques.
Membership of the group is open to all interested parties who accept the
group's
charter
; W3C Membership
is not a prerequisite. To join the group, simply join our discussions;
there is no formal list of members.
The Interest Group functions primarily through public email lists hosted
by W3C. The main list is
archives
).
Other lists sponsored by the Interest Group include
www-rdf-logic
www-rdf-calendar
sparql-dev
and
www-annotation
The
www-rdf-interest
(1999-2005) was previously the main list for the IG.) The
Mailing
List Administrivia page
explains how to join these or other
W3C
discussion lists
The mailing lists are used for technical discussions. It is better to
avoid discussions on various non-technical subjects, for example on
patents and patent applications. If need be, separate mailing lists
may
be set up at W3C or elsewhere for these.
Task Forces
The SWIG sometimes forms sub-groups to investigate specific topics.
Current taskforces (see
announcement
):
Blogs, Wikis, Directories, Meetups
For some years, the
planetrdf.com
site has provided an aggregation of RDF-related blogs.
W3C also hosts the
ESW Wiki
this began in the
SWAD-Europe
project but was adopted by the wider SWIG community. W3C also now hosts a
Semantic Web standards
wiki.
The
Linked Data
LOD community project maintain a wiki
list of
Common
Vocabularies
Sindice
provides a lookup index
into a large body of RDF data. This includes a useful
inspector
utility.
Several members of the SWIG community have been sharing answers to
common RDF/SemWeb questions on the
SemanticOverflow
site.
There are regular local “meetups” in the Semantic Web area around the
globe. The
search result
on the
“Meetup” site gives a link to most of those.
24x7 chat: #swig IRC channel
Many in the RDF/SW community make use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
channels for collaboration, in particular via the
FreeNode
network (channel
#swig
for
general SWIG discussion). The
#swig
scratchpad
, a link annotation system, is provided by Edd Dumbill. It
selectively logs comments made in IRC, via an IRC bot '
dc_swig
(see
chump
site for details).
Complete
public logs
of the discussions on the #swig channel are also available (in text, html
and rdf flavours), thanks to Dave Beckett of ILRT.
Note
: IRC discussion should be considered public
(insecure, loggable etc). IRC chats are not a formal mechanism for W3C
Interest Group communications and discussion; it may be useful to
circulate summaries of IRC discussion to the archived RDF IG mailing
lists.
IRC Resources:
IRC Help
IRC.org
OpenProjects IRC
(please read
about
freenode: using the network
).
Linked Data
The
Linking
Open Data
community project began as an activity of the
W3C
SWEO group
(chartered
2006-2008
).
The project was inspired by
Tim
Berners-Lee
's 2006
DesignIssues
Linked Data
note. That Note discussed the importance of URIs for linking RDF, and
suggested some improvements to FOAF's
hypertext
RDF
design, which used some
pre-RDFCore
constructs. The Linked Data community evangelised these improved
principles very effectively, leading to a massive increase in the amount
of public linked data in the Web.
Increasingly, RDF and Semantic Web technologies show up in the wider
world as "Linked Data". Key resources include
linkeddata.org
the now-famous
cloud
diagram
DBpedia
(an RDF view of
Wikipedia
) and the
public-lod
mailing list. See also
TimBL's
TED talk
and Wikipedia's
Linked
Data
entry.
Common shallow ontologies and other topical discussions
The SWIG has looked at various subject areas where "a little semantics
goes a long way". Some simple shallow ontologies for concepts shared by
many applications can play a very strong role in linking together many
applications.
Many of these are discussed in a mixture of email lists, IRC chat, and
Wiki.
Geospatial
This topic has been on the subject list of the Interest Group, but it then
now moved into a separate W3C Incubator Group. The the
GEO
XG’s home page
for further details. The
SWIG
"Basic Geo" vocabulary
is quite widely used.
Calendaring
Time is the next dimension to consider as property which unites many data
systems. See the informal
Relational Databases and RDF
Personal Identity - FOAF
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) system is one in which people can describe
themselves in machine-processable form, including contact details and list
of people they know. Several million FOAF files
link
together
across the web.
A W3C Note describing an updated version of
vCard
in RDF
is also available. In 2009 a
Social
Web incubator group
was chartered to explore related issues.
Several SWIG and SocialWeb XG participants have collaborated on the
FOAF+SSL
work, which combines the use of digital certificate technology with RDF's
flexible approach to description. W3C hosts two experimental vocabularies
to support this work -
cert:
and
rsa:
. At the time of
writing these are still under development and have not received formal
review in any W3C process. Feedback on the design is welcome, either on
the
foaf-protocols
list or via the
Social
Web incubator
The FOAF vocabulary is also accompanied by an experimental
'Web
of Trust'
vocabulary, designed to support
PGP-signing
of RDF documents
. It has not undergone any formal security review,
and discussion on how to progress this work (and converge with X509-based
signing) is welcome on the SWIG and FOAF lists.
Organizations
In June 2010 the UK Government
Linked Data
project
contributed
an ontology for describing organizations. This is
hosted
at W3C thanks to
Tim
Berners-Lee's
involvement, and discussion of the work is welcome on
the
public-lod
and
public-egov-ig
lists.
Media formats
Web Architecture vocabularies
Misc.
Other w3.org RDF vocabs of unknown status
...
Vocabulary Status vocabulary
As we develop RDF vocabularies in a grassroots fashion, it is important
to indicate their status. One approach to this problem is to use the
Vocabulary
Status
vocabulary. This was initially developed by members of the
SWIG and FOAF communities, and has since 2003 become fairly widely used.
It is itself not yet well documented, but an initial draft towards a W3C
Note is
available
Discussion is welcome in all the usual SWIG fora.
See also the
Semantic Web
Deployment
which takes on specific efforts in this sort of area.
Meetings
SWIG F2F at 2008 Tech Plenary
Cannes Mandelieu, France. No formal meeting summary, but see
#swig
archives for
Oct
20
and
Oct
21
3rd face to face meeting, Thursday 2nd March 2006, Cannes Mandelieu,
France. (
wiki-based
agenda
; see also
initial
mail
for more info)
2nd face to face meeting, 28 Feb &
1 March 2005, Boston USA
(see also
SwigAtTP2005
in wiki)
1st face to face meeting, 1-2 March 2004,
Cannes-Mandelieu, France
RDF IG meeting, 26-27 Feb 2001,
Cambridge MA, USA
Dan Brickley
(Semantic Web Interest Group chair) and
Ivan
Herman
Semantic Web Interest Group Staff Contact
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.78 2018/10/15 15:15:00 ivan Exp $
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